The Melbourne Review

Songs for everybody

May 2013

New work from Australia’s leading contemporary playwright Joanna Murray-Smith will be staged across the country this year, as the novelist and playwright prepares for a year bricked with wall-to-wall productions.

With two productions of original new work (True Minds and Fury, staged in Melbourne and Sydney respectively), an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the State Theatre Company of SA, as well as an opera, overseas productions of older work and more, Murray-Smith has a busy 2013 ahead. But The Songs for Nobodies and Honour writer, who was in Los Angeles for a production of The Gift earlier in the year, says she didn’t set herself up to have a frantic year.

“I spent a month in LA over summer with that production,” she begins. “There’s a line in it that artists spend their lives at the mercy of other people’s tastes. And that line just keeps reverberating in my head because you know you’re not really in charge of what happens in terms of whether the plays are picked up or not. Last year I had virtually nothing on and this year I’ve got wall-to-wall productions, so you don’t set yourself up for anything. You throw things out there and hope that some of them are going to land on a stage. If you’re lucky people are interested in what you’re doing and it will work out.

“Also, the artistic directors, it is not even whether they like or don’t like your work, it’s whether it works in the season they have planned, you know, things like: do they have too many comedies or dramas or enough Australian work and so on. There’s a little bit of alchemy involved I think.”
The LA production of The Gift received standing ovations but divided the critics. Murray-Smith says the Maria Aitken-directed play, which was first staged in Melbourne in 2011, was much better by the time it got to California.

“The audiences were incredible – they came in droves and gave a standing ovation at most performances. They argued about it and we had brilliant post show feedback with people staying back and talking about it because it is a very difficult, controversial play. It divided the critics as it always does – The LA Times hated it, Variety adored it, so that’s pretty standard for my work now – my plays always get mixed reviews. I’ve very rarely had a play where everyone has said ‘we love it’ or even where everyone has said ‘we hate it’ – I don’t know what it is about me but that’s the way it is.”

The exception to this is Songs for Nobodies, which has received universal acclaim. Written to show off Bernadette Robinson’s amazing voice and range, the musical has been performed all over the country with Broadway interested.

“We did a showcase over there, and there are all these jaded, cynical Broadway guys who have to be dragged to the theatre kicking and screaming to see her [Bernadette Robinson] because in New York terms both she and I are unknown. I’ve had a few things on in New York but Bernadette has not performed in New York at all… but everyone came. She had a standing ovation at the end of it and all of these diehard New York theatre people said they had never seen a standing ovation given for a showcase before and there was a huge amount of excitement about it.”

The one thing stopping Songs for Nobodies getting the Broadway green light is the lack of star power. But Murray-Smith says the show will not happen without Robinson.

“She is the show. What most people in New York said is we can’t think of anyone in America who can do this play. She is extraordinary. She’s not just extraordinary in Australian terms, she’s extraordinary in international terms.”
Currently Murray-Smith is writing an opera called The Divorce for Opera Australia as well as two American commissions. Murray-Smith describes True Minds (currently being staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company) as an “out and out comedy”.

“It’s modelled a little on the kind of Preston Sturges-type romantic comedies that we’ve seen on film. It’s about someone who thinks they are in love with one person but they’re really in love with someone else. We, the audience, know it and we know they are going to find out the truth and we know they’re going to end up with the right person but we don’t know how it’s going to happen and how is she going to realise that.

“It’s a very, very simple story about a young woman who has written this sociological kind of bestseller, an unexpected bestseller, about how a man will never commit to a woman his mother doesn’t approve of and this holds true now as much as it ever has. The play takes place on the night when she’s about to meet her potential mother-in-law and everything that can go wrong does go wrong, including the arrival on the doorstep during this massive storm that’s happening throughout the entire play, of her ex-boyfriend Mitch (who has just stopped off on his way out of rehab and is a very, very naughty boy) and she’s got to get rid of him before the mother-in-law arrives.”

True Minds continues at the Southbank Theatre until June 8.
mtc.com.au

Images:

1. Adam Murphy and Nikki Shiels
2. Nikki Shiels, Matt McFarlane, Louise Siversen and Genevieve Morris

Photos:Jeff Busby.

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