Robert Reid
is an award winning playwright from Melbourne, and the Artistic Director and
co-founder of Theatre in Decay. He’s a prolific writer, writing between seven
and fifteen plays a year, and has written all but one of the plays for Theatre
in Decay. Reid has also had work produced by other companies throughout Australia, and is currently in Perth for the world premier of Portraits
of Modern Evil - the second draft of which was commissioned by the Black Swan Theatre Company - and which is
currently being performed by the Hotbed Ensemble.
I caught
Reid not long after he landed in Perth,
before attending the opening night of Portraits,
and asked him if he was excited about the world premier. “No, not particularly,” he chuckled, “this is like my 60th opening
night, the edge wears off after a while.” Not bad for a writer under 35. I
asked him what he put his fruitfulness down to. “My stock response used to be – well, I don’t sleep – and that was
certainly true back then. Now I just say that it’s what I do.”
Reid is no
shrinking violet when it comes to voicing his opinion about where theatre in Australia is
headed. In his original manifesto for Theatre in Decay, he writes: “[We] are sick to death of new companies
claiming to have revolutionised theatre while recycling the same tired old
movement exercises. We are not
impressed. We say the answer is not to place a few TV screens onstage in
a vein attempt to become Multimedia…Now that acting has become about the actor's
internal struggle, audiences feel left out. Really, who wants to pay good money to watch someone else masturbate? If
theatre claims the moral ground of high art, then we take the brutal and
scatological low ground. Real art comes from the gutter. From the
sewer.”
Considering
one of the central characters of Portraits
of Modern Evil is based on Australia’s
first serial killer, Eddie Leonski, it would seem that Reid is
adhering to his manifesto. The idea for the play came about when Reid was
working on a project that saw him researching the history of Melbourne; he came across Eddie
Leonski and found out that Albert Tucker, the famous Australian painter, had
painted a portrait inspired by him. Reid discovered that the two men had a
similar background in many ways, and, ever the artist, he imaged what their
conversation might have been had Leonski actually sat for Tucker.
The play is set in Melbourne
during the Second World War. A recently repatriated Tucker is engaged by a
homesick Leonski to paint his portrait so he can send it home to America. Tucker,
who is struggling to keep private the psychological damage he incurred during
the war, starts to recognise elements of Leonski in himself; a chilling
realisation for Tucker. For Leonski however - who has had no-one with whom to
share the violence that lurks within him – the identification is liberating and
bloody. And for both there are brutal consequences.
There are interesting
parallels between Tucker and Leonski in their violent approach to women; one
through his painting, and one with his hands
Tucker is
well known for the ‘Images of Modern Evil’ series of paintings he produced
during and after the war, and their merciless portrayal of women. I asked Reid
if he addressed this and he said that this comprises one of the main themes of
the play. “There are interesting
parallels between Tucker and Leonski in their violent approach to women; one
through his painting, and one with his hands.” Reid went on to comment that
although he hasn’t delved deep into all of Tucker’s work, he particularly likes
the ‘Images of Modern Evil’ series because of Tucker’s use of colour.
Portraits of Modern Evil is a play about the universality of war and the brutal
impact it can have. It explores the frailty of human nature, a subject not
unknown to Reid himself. His 2005 award winning play A Mile in Her Shadow is based on Reid’s own experience with
Dissociation Disorder (a term describing a range of conditions that disrupt the
typical integration of self-perception and behaviour; an extreme expression of
the disorder was formerly known as multiple personality disorder). I asked Reid
if, since writing A Mile in Her Shadow, he
felt a greater sense of freedom in exploring this aspect of human nature and he
replied, “Not since I wrote it, as I do
look at it with a lot of my work. A Mile in Her Shadow is about breaking it
apart, where Portraits is targeted more at a mainstream audience.” And it’s
in this direction that Reid has developed his writing style after A Mile in Her Shadow: “My rhythmical approach to language is still
the same, but I learnt how to write for a bigger audience while achieving the
same effect - but in a less confronting way so there’s less work for the
audience to do, but they can still engage with the ideas.”
Being both a writer and a visual artist (with a background
in art history), Reid is keen for an audience to be engaged on several levels
and uses multimedia images in the play. When I asked him how much he thinks in
visuals when he’s writing, he replied, “I
do and I don’t. I don’t write a lot of stage direction… it’s like opening up a
window in your head and seeing what’s there, but I don’t like to restrict a
director.” Despite the fact that Reid has directed many of his own plays,
he has no qualms about handing over a script to another director, enjoying
instead what comes from collaborative processes, such as this one with The
Hotbed Ensemble. “The more people that
are involved in a project opens up the scope of interpretations of the work.”
Thring is Back3RRR and Hoy Polloy Theatre take a look at the Hollywood actor with the monstrous moniker - Thring The Thing. Paul Andrew interviews Director Wayne Pearn and Actor Michael F. Cahill
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Robert Reid
is an award winning playwright from Melbourne, and the Artistic Director and
co-founder of Theatre in Decay. He’s a prolific writer, writing between seven
and fifteen plays a year, and has written all but one of the plays for Theatre
in Decay. Reid has also had work produced by other companies throughout Australia, and is currently in Perth for the world premier of Portraits
of Modern Evil - the second draft of which was commissioned by the Black Swan Theatre Company - and which is
currently being performed by the Hotbed Ensemble.
Being both a writer and a visual artist (with a background
in art history), Reid is keen for an audience to be engaged on several levels
and uses multimedia images in the play. When I asked him how much he thinks in
visuals when he’s writing, he replied, “I
do and I don’t. I don’t write a lot of stage direction… it’s like opening up a
window in your head and seeing what’s there, but I don’t like to restrict a
director.” Despite the fact that Reid has directed many of his own plays,
he has no qualms about handing over a script to another director, enjoying
instead what comes from collaborative processes, such as this one with The
Hotbed Ensemble. “The more people that
are involved in a project opens up the scope of interpretations of the work.”
