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By George - she's got 'It'
Ever since she began writing plays, Hannie Rayson has sent critics and arts commentators looking for comparisons. In the late 80s she was hailed as the female David Williamson; more recently she has been described as the performing arts version of Helen Garner.
As far as Hannie Rayson is concerned, she is simply forging her own path, and her own distinctive style of writing that captures an essential element of the time. She works for years in isolation, preparing a play before it hits the stage.
Rayson's latest play, Life After George, enjoyed a sellout season and critical acclaim in Melbourne last year. It also enjoyed seasons for the Brisbane Festival and in Sydney. This year it will tour nationally.
The play scooped the pool in this year's Green Room nominations-where it was nominated for eight awards-and won: Best New Australian Play, Best Sound Design, Best Male Actor in a Featured Role, and Best Female Actor in a Leading Role.
Life After George traces the life of a colourful historian and lovable rogue, Peter George. Through him, the play explores the future of liberal education and the rise of managerialism-issues firmly at the centre of current social debate.
So how does Rayson, a successful playwright for many years, respond to claims that her work has come of age?
'Life After George was a watershed for me. In a way my writing has come of age. When I was working on George, I felt myself pushing through our cultural resistance to passion: our self-consciousness about the passionate gesture, the passionate expression,' Rayson says.
'In the past there has always been an insistent and wry person standing at my side saying, "That's a bit rich. Lay it on with a trowel why don't you?" So I would retreat from the grand gesture or feel the need to counter it with self-deprecatory joke. The cautiousness that I might be over-the-top or melodramatic has now receded.
'Sometimes in the theatre, we steer clear of powerful emotions in the name of achieving subtlety. But subtlety is like obscurity: useless in the theatre. Clarity, boldness and truth are what's needed. Subtlety implies the need to play things down; writing George taught me to play things up.'
In the play, Peter George married the 'It' girl of three successive generations. 'The "It" girl was a convenient way of charting change which has been more evident in women's lives over the past 30 years than in men's,' she says.
'The "It" girl was an idea my editor, Hilary Glow, came up with. It was a clarifying moment, not a guideline for creating rich dimensionalised characters.'
'The second issue is to do with interchangeability of partners. I didn't create a man who had three wives in order to hold him up for our scrutiny and say "See what a miserable person". In fact, I had no judgement at all about his sexual proclivities. I thought he was marvelous-deeply flawed, but in the final analysis it was his appetite for life which I wanted to celebrate. As he says "You can't have a feast without creating a mess".'
Rayson confesses she enjoys creating complex, dark characters in her writing.
'One of the joys of being a playwright is that you can absolutely revel in someone else's dreadfulness. You can allow yourself one more nasty aside, experiment with being just that bit more greedy, or sink recklessly into deep green envy. And then you turn off the word processor and go about being the mild-mannered, easy-going individual whom your family and friends know. Sexual infidelity was not my primary target. Where my critique was being applied with more ferocity was in the character of Lindsay, the second wife-the student radical who has become a number cruncher at the University: Dean of Arts.'
Rayson describes her play as the triumph of managerialism as a social phenomenon arguing that this trend deserves our attention and our concern.
'In all aspects of our community it's the day of the manager. And as a manager, Lindsay makes a series of professional compromises which collectively serve to undermine the concept of the public in civic life. To me, this is one of the key philosophical and moral issues of our times.'
According to Rayson, corporatisation of Australian culture has been steady.
'It seems to me one of the tasks of a public artform like the theatre is to identify these ideological shifts and to ask: "is this what we want?"'
Life After George has strong themes exploring the erosion of traditional liberal education. George, the historian, represents this view, voicing protest at the demise of his discipline and the liberal arts generally. Rayson says it was her intention to mourn the loss of the traditional university, reminding us of the values of the 'old days' of academic pursuit and campus life.
'I remember the old days with fondness. I had the time of my life at University and then at drama school at the Victorian College of the Arts. But I am very aware that a lot of contemporary critique can be seen as merely social nostalgia and, as such, is not usefully addressing the present or indeed the future,' she explains.
'The emphasis on vocationalism and entrepreneurship in lieu of scholarship is a corrosion of one of the core values of a liberal education. The real possibility that our children will not be able to study science or history or classical studies is not merely sad-it's preposterous. The failure of academic staff to alert the community to what's happening, and to resist, is very troubling.'
Rayson says she relishes the feeling of liberation, felt when making powerful comments about society through theatrical characters, that possibly isn't available to other artforms as potently as theatre.
'I think theatre is potentially the most subversive of all the artforms. I say "potentially" because the theatre scene is full of earnest young men in black T-shirts who talk about being subversive, but what they mean is aesthetically subversive: "subverting the form," rather than politically subversive. They want to assault the senses rather than change the world. I have felt for a long time that, unless theatre addresses the public agenda, it will die. We need a content-led recovery.'
Hannie Rayson has earned many awards-most recently the Green Room awards and the Victorian Premiers' Literary Award for Life After George. Her play was commissioned by the Melbourne Theatre Company, and funded by the Australia Council. Many of her plays have been performed internationally. Hotel Sorrento was adapted for the screen, attracting ten AFI Award nominations, and Rayson herself has been awarded an honorary doctorate by LaTrobe University.
Life After George has been funded by Playing Australia to tour to Hobart, Launceston, Frenchs Forest, Bathurst, Wollongong, Canberra, Mt Isa, Townsville, Gladstone, Maryborough, Nunawading, Adelaide, Frankston, Bendigo, Geelong and Warragul from August to September 2001.