Interview with Ruby Moon Playwright - Matt Cameron
http://www.hothousetheatre.com.au/pub_news/20046950610.htm
What was your initial inspiration in writing the play Ruby Moon?
To some degree I was inspired by headlines. Sadly those sorts of headlines are a constant, but for some reason there may have been a number of them at the time which sparked me. A missing child is such a universal tragedy with a primal impact. It arouses such potent emotions in the people that it immediately affects, and then beyond that, to communities. I can read a story from the other side of the world concerning a missing child and it still has a powerful emotional effect so empathy is not just about proximity. The challenge with Ruby Moon has been finding a way of writing a play that told a fictional story about a missing child that was distinctive because in some ways it is familiar territory.
Did you have any dramaturgical input for Ruby Moon and would you talk about the process?
I definitely had dramaturgical input. I feel relatively self-sufficient as a playwright, but at the same time I crave collaboration and, for me, the best dramaturg is the director of the play – assuming I approve of the choice of director. In this case that’s Aidan Fennessy and I’ve been working with him for many years now. Aidan’s contribution has been enormous. He is a wonderful writer and, to my mind, a great director. What he provides can seem so simple but it’s a revelation to me. He helps focus and distill the ideas. It can come from him talking about how he might stage a scene and just hearing that helps to clarify for me how I should rewrite it in order to make it more effective. He has also provided direct suggestions of edits and ideas that I have brazenly adopted and claimed as my own.
Were there any particular themes or concepts you wished to highlight in the play Ruby Moon?
On some level, although it’s probably obscure, I felt like the play was about the prevailing fear of our times. I was trying to get beyond the fear of losing a child and actually look at the nature of that unease, that dis-ease, that lurks and hovers in the world that we live in at the moment. In this country there is at present a climate of fear that we are being sold by our government. They claim their actions are about easing and removing that fear but I think they’re nurturing it, feeding it. It’s the classic ploy of corrupt power, to convince us that we are in peril and then offer themselves as our only protection. So I was quite interested in trying to explore notions of anxiety, doubt, loss and barely suppressed terror. To me anyway, it feels like the pervasive fear and mistrust that exists in Flaming Tree Grove is something of a microcosm of where Australia is at the moment. Like an ache in our collective soul that we haven’t yet worked out how to heal.
How would you describe the style of your play?
Gothic, absurd, nightmarish, surreal. I make a conscious effort in writing a play to make it theatrical and abstract. I think there are playwrights who do naturalism brilliantly, so I leave that territory to them. However, I think that playwrights who don’t do naturalism well are responsible for boring theatre. So if I can’t write great naturalism then I would rather not write it at all. Ruby Moon is written, therefore in the style that I favour which is a type of heightened naturalism. It is still very much predicated on universal human emotions but isn’t directly about topical events or specific places, but hopefully evokes them.
Did you envisage a particular space or set for Ruby Moon?
This is not specifically the set that I envisaged but I love the set for this production. I certainly can’t take credit for it. When I was writing Ruby Moon, I imagined the literal landscape, knowing that we would be representing that on stage, and that we’d be trying to trigger that image. So I was trying to imagine a street in my head which had these old, dark trees and street lamps, with pockets of light and vast shadows. I was imagining a street at night even though the story of Ruby’s disappearance begins on a screamingly hot summer’s day.
Overwhelmingly the street felt to me like a street that probably looks picture-perfect during the day but at night suddenly becomes frightening and portentous. I grew up in the sad, bare outer suburbs. This particular image, though, was probably more inner suburban with old deciduous trees, a really established suburb. So I imagined that real, natural world and then imagined the context for it on stage. I started to imagine a room, a room that was arrested in time because, for these parents, the loss of their child has caused everything to stop and has allowed the dust to accumulate. I imagined that everything was locked in a time warp.
All about Christen - July 21 2003
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/07/20/1058639656820.html
Christen O'Leary hopes that her time has come when an actor's depth of character and experience count for more than looks. "There are plenty of pretty girls around who are thin, with dyed blonde hair - they're a dime a dozen," she says. "I hope that because I'm short and look a bit odd that things will start to get better as I'm getting older."
O'Leary, 36, is being tough on herself. It's true she is short (she comes in at just on 155 centimetres) but she has an endearing, urchin's face and a lot of talent. Two Green Room awards from four nominations are proof of that.
"I was never going to play Ophelia (in Hamlet) or Rosalind (As You Like It) but I hope my experience as a character actor will pay off in terms of longevity."
She is preparing for her role in Matt Cameron's new play, Ruby Moon, at Playbox, which the playwright describes as "Camberwell meets Blue Velvet", the cult film by David Lynch. The multi-award-winning Cameron, author of Tears From A Glass Eye, Mr Melancholy and Man the Balloon, wrote his latest play especially for O'Leary and her co-star, Peter Houghton, because he believes that O'Leary has already done more than enough to earn superstar status.
"I was at the opening performance of Stephen Sondheim's Company at the Melbourne Theatre Company (in 2000) and Christen came out with an absolute show-stopper," he says. "In any other country, a performance like that would change an actor's life. It's sad that in this country, not even the entrepreneurs pounced."
O'Leary confirms that her salary has not increased as the result of winning awards. But she has learned not to be bashful about her singing ability. "I always shied away from singing because people in musicals are a breed in themselves," she says. "But given how hard it can be to get a job, I've learned to be happy to push whatever I've got."
She knew nothing about Company when the MTC director, Simon Phillips, offered her the role three years ago. Her agent told her that the song, Getting Married Today, was a show-stopper so she went out and listened to the soundtrack.
"That made me absolutely terrified," she laughs, even though she performed Sondheim's equally difficult The Miller's Song in A Little Night Music for the MTC two years earlier.
But her performance "literally stopped the show", according to The Age's review by Helen Thomson.
It also won her a second Green Room award. Cameron has written two songs for O'Leary to sing in Ruby Moon, set to music by her composer husband, Andrew McNaughton.
She says an uncle always suggested that she make an album and she regrets now that she has not made it into a recording studio. "Singing touches people in a way that acting doesn't," she says. "A lot of people know they can't sing but everyone thinks they can act a bit - just look at Big Brother."
She studied drama at the University of South-East Queensland and graduated when she was only 20. Her mother was a speech and drama teacher and O'Leary says at university she had to forget all her mother's instructions because she spoke too properly. In her final year, a lecturer warned her not too expect much work early in her career because of competition from taller and prettier actors.
"It took me four years to get a job with the Queensland Theatre Company, and I must have played every maid's part ever written."
She has never sought her 15 minutes of fame in the media spotlight and is bemused "by all the 15-year-old Americans in bikinis" who appear all over the media. "How can you compete with that?" she asks. "They are typecast to be successful."
But she acknowledges many younger actors would envy her CV, which includes 10 roles for the MTC (her most recent role there in last year's Laughter on the 23rd Floor) and more with the QTC. She has now branched into television, with a small continuing role in the new Cox-Knight drama, CrashBurn, to screen on Channel Ten later this year. She found the experience of working in television "terrifying" because of the much shorter rehearsal times than she knows from theatre. O'Leary says the best way to learn new techniques is to risk failure during rehearsals, to be able to learn from other actors. She appreciates the imagination that her co-star Houghton brings to the rehearsal room because she says both are finding the writing challenging.
Ruby Moon is about a couple still trying to deal with the disappearance of their daughter some years earlier while on the way to visit her grandmother. It turns into a detective story as they visit neighbours seeking clues to what happened, with the two actors playing all the characters.
Cameron considered monologues at first but quickly realised it would have been a "waste of talent", given that he considers Houghton and O'Leary two of the country's top actors. He earns most his money writing for such television shows as Micallef, SeaChange and CrashBurn, and finds his first love, theatre, pays little better than a hobby. He is writing a telemovie for the Colin Friels detective series Blackjack, and has a play being considered by the MTC. "There are always sad experiences involved in writing for television because the writer is little more than plankton at the bottom of the food chain," he says.
Cameron finds theatre to be the opposite, with almost too much reverence given to the completed script. That is why he appreciates working on Ruby Moon with the actors and the director, Aidan Fennessy.
"They are all creative people of infinite good taste whose opinions I value," he says.
Cameron plans a break from playwrighting for a year or more after the opening of Ruby Moon. "Writing a new play is such hard work that it is important to have something worthwhile to say when you set out," he says.
Like many people, he found the MTC's current production of Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Visit one of the best experiences he has had in the theatre.
"I couldn't think of anything better than to have a play produced 50 years after it was written that has such an impact," he says, "That is one of the great things about writing for the theatre."
Ruby Moon is at Playbox from July 30 to August 16.
http://www.rgm.com.au/mc_lit.html
Biography of Matt Cameron