Australia’s Busiest Playwright

Joanna Murray-Smith talks to Coral Drouyn about her amazing year.

“Creatives are born – they cannot be manufactured. It’s nature, though sometimes genes play a big part. But that’s only one element. How creativity is developed, how it is channelled, how it expresses itself…that’s nurture. If my family had been different, I might have been a painter, or an actress, or a musician. But I came from a family of intellectual academics, and words were the Holy Grail. So becoming a writer was the inevitable expression of my creativity. As a child I loved theatre, loved sitting in the dark seeing other people’s lives, joys, problems, unfold in front of me – so performance writing was the most exciting life path I could ever imagine.”

These words come from Joanna Murray-Smith, arguably Australia’s second most famous playwright, though this year in particular she is probably our busiest. She has two world premieres opening in Australia within two weeks of each other. The STC will present Fury, opening on April 15^th, and the MTC will follow 10 days later with True Minds. A day after that her adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler opens at The Adelaide Festival Centre.

Three openings in the space of two weeks might well be a record for any playwright, but Joanna thrives on work and the energy that it requires. It’s doubtful that she could survive for long without the adrenaline rush of creativity, and her 18 plays, three novels and various other writings, including film and television and even a libretto, attest to that.

“I’m very hands-on with first productions. I’m there for rehearsals, I rework lines, I crystallise the grey areas on the page once I see the character take shape through the actor. Often I will edit or rewrite before a second production. I know too well that nothing is perfect. Sometimes I think I know what I’ve written, only to realise that there are things in a play that sub-textually alter the themes, and yet I had no awareness of it.

“True Minds is a classic case. I thought I was writing an out and out comedy, light and entertaining, but now I’m not so sure. People keep telling me – ‘You don’t know what you’ve got here,’ and I’m astounded by what they are finding at deeper levels, none of which was intentional.”

Isn’t that what good writing is about, I query? Often as writers there’s a deeper consciousness at work – a truth which exists in its own right and finds its way into the journey? Joanna agrees.

“We look for emotional truth in the characters, but sometimes we miss some universal truths that lie deeper. We like to think, after writing for a lot of years, that we’re getting better and better, and that we find the emotional truth more easily. Like everything in life, you expect to get better with age, but it isn’t always true, and sometimes it’s not easy to see that when you’re so close to the work. The audience always tells you. It is the ultimate judge.”

So who is Joanna’s audience? She’s been accused of being too privileged, too middle class, in her creation of characters. Is that a liability or an asset?

“Neither, really. It’s a valid criticism. But that’s who I am. I did have a privileged up-bringing. It’s what I know; what I understand. I do have writers and other ‘arty types’ as characters. But why should there be any less interest or empathy for the drama those people experience in their lives? The trappings of social status don’t mean that pain, or happiness, or moral dilemmas are excluded from your life. It’s just that they might be explored differently.

“My audience is essentially me – women of a certain age, a certain upbringing, financially comfortable (or they couldn’t afford the exorbitant price of main stage theatre) and a certain intelligence. My truth is mine, and no truth is absolute. But it is as valid as anyone else’s. I write for the Main Stage. I want to see cheaper ticket prices so that theatre is accessible to every-one. I’m not averse to alternative experimental work. Theatre needs to continue to grow. But new isn’t always better, and I’m far more committed to pursuing excellence than I am to doing something avant-garde just to see if I can. I don’t apologise for that.”

Nor should she. Her father, Stephen Murray-Smith, was a noted academic and a passionate Labor Party supporter. One of Australia’s great intellects, some of us remember him and Barry Jones as quiz whizzes. But he was a great essayist and writer (though he also co-wrote a book of bawdy ballads under a ribald pseudonym). His wife, Nita Bluthal, was an educator, whose brother, John Bluthal, is a prominent actor much loved in British comedy for a host of films and television work with Spike Milligan. In Australia though, he’s probably best remembered as the Mafia Don in Castrol’s “Oils aint Oils” ads.

“It was probably not your average family,” Joanna concedes, “but it was exhilarating as a little girl to sit somewhere out of sight, when I should have been in bed, in the house at Mt Eliza and listen to my father, so much larger than life, philosophise and argue about politics, academia and Australia. Friends came and went whenever they chose. It was always open house. But it wasn’t very long before I started to notice that the wives of these strongly opinionated men always took a back seat, even though they were generally as intelligent as their husbands. It fascinated me, in the late sixties and early seventies when I was very young, that women, particularly the middle-aged, seemed to accept that men held all the power.”

That insight stayed with her through her early plays and crystallised when she wrote Honour at the age of 32. Broke, and with a husband and a three month old son in tow, she wrote it as a commission, whilst studying at Columbia in New York. 

It was not an especially original premise. A husband, fearing his own mortality as age engulfs him, abandons his loyal and loving wife for a younger woman. What made it different, and special enough to be a hit on Broadway and all over the world, was the exploration of the “what ifs” in the life of Honour, the wife who has given up her individuality and her dreams, and sublimated her own potential to be the best of wives, only to be emotionally sucked dry and then discarded by a man she trusted.

Those early dinner parties she observed, and the quiet wives abandoning their own intelligence to atrophy, form part of a recurring theme for Joanna. Every play asks thematic questions along the lines of “What is love?” “How do we balance a relationship with our own integrity?” “How do we know if we have chosen the right partner?” 

Her newest play, True Minds, continues the theme when a young woman must meet her prospective mother-in-law for the first time, believing that if she doesn’t approve, then the wedding is off.

They’re universal themes, and Murray-Smith is a universal playwright. She doesn’t support the idea of local identity or the call to “tell our own stories”. In fact, like so many good writers, she deliberately makes her storytelling universal. “Life is universal,” she says, “and so is love and death, and insecurity. The setting may change, but people’s dreams, hopes, fears, don’t. I don’t want my plays to seem parochial or inaccessible in other countries. I want the audience to feel that they know these people…that they might be living next door.”

Joanna has just returned from California, where The Gift – her play from 2011 – opened at the Pasadena Playhouse. She edited out the few Australian-isms and was gratified when audience members assumed it was set in America. “Once an audience is engaged, they don’t want the connection to be broken by something that is alien to them.”

Like her heroine Margot in The Female of The Species Joanna Murray-Smith is a talented, driven, strongly opinionated woman. But, unlike Margot (based on Germaine Greer), she isn’t a rampant feminist. She’s married and raising three children, and that means different things take different priorities at different times. It’s complex but not complicated.

“Between plays, the kids are number one. They understand that I work but they also know that when I’m not working they come first. When I was writing my first novel I would put the baby down for a nap and know that I had two or three hours to work on the book and I had to write around 3,000 words in that time. The limited time meant that I actually completed the novel far quicker than if I’d had all the time in the world.”

Is she ever worried she will run out of things to write about?

“Not really, there is always a new take, a new perception, to explore in any subject. I’m not great with plot. I’m far more interested in people and how they react and why. A one sentence premise can be enough for me to start a play, but a heavily plotted storyline which the characters just move through would probably not interest me much.”

Is that the reason why she’s turned her back on television after some great success in her early career?

“Possibly, but I think it’s more about control. I want my work to be mine, and I’m happy to be judged and stand or fall by the outcome. I have to believe in what I write, and that leaves space for opinion, but not for others imposing their beliefs.”

And if she couldn’t write?

“Don’t even say it,” she chuckles, “that would be like asking me not to breathe.”

Originally published in the March / April 2013 edition of Stage Whispers.

Coral Drouyn is a multi-nominated, award winning television writer with 30 years experience. Best known as the Script Producer and writer of such shows as Prisoner, Home and Away and Blue Heelers (among others) she is now semi-retired and enjoying a new path as a theatre reviewer. Having started in theatre more than 50 years ago, she is currently writing her first full length play in 40 years.