The year 1996 was one of those 'best of times, worst of times' for Angus Cerini. In perhaps its defining moment, he was beaten up on a train by a group of young men after intervening when they harassed a couple of older women.
A first-year creative arts student at Melbourne University, he'd stopped smoking weed in order to get his head together to play a war criminal in a Student Union production of Daniel Keene's Because You Are Mine, about the civil war and ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia — ongoing at the time.
"I thought 'I'm going to get off the bongs and really do this play well'. And it was when I got off the bongs that I think everything I'd been blocking out came in," he says.
A confluence of the physical trauma of being beaten up and the withdrawals — Cerini had what he describes as a "psychotic" episode: "I looped out, it was pretty bad," he says.
And then while he was recovering in hospital, something fateful happened. Friends — young men — who came to visit him shared their own experiences of violence.
"They started telling me these stories; and the stories were quite full on."
He wrote some of these down, and that became Recidivist — his first play — which debuted at the university's Muddy Shorts festival in 1997. That's how Cerini met playwright Lally Katz, who also had a work in the festival — and they've been friends (and sometime-colleagues) ever since.
"I'd been unwell for years, but undiagnosed, and then I got bashed — and [in this theatre scene] I was allowed to be who and what I was, or could be, in an environment that was full of odd and amazing and brilliant people.
"I'm really lucky to have ended up there."
The week we talk, Parliament is set to consider legislation that will increase the cost of arts and humanities degrees (after we talk, the bill is passed) — something that is not lost on Cerini.
"You know, what good is a Bachelor of Creative Arts? It doesn't really do anything — you can't be an engineer. But for me, it sort of saved me, right? If I hadn't had that, I don't know where I would have ended up, and what that would have cost society," he says.
Eventually, and after many other plays, that creative arts degree gave rise to Cerini's 2014 play The Bleeding Tree, a startlingly poetic revenge drama about domestic violence and murder in a "bone-dry" small-town country community.
It contained one of the best sequences in recent Australian theatre history, delivered by a middle-aged wife and mother, and her two daughters:
MOTHER: Girls, I think your father's dead.
DAUGHTER 1: I knocked his knees out.
DAUGHTER 2: I conked his head.
MOTHER: I shot that house-clown in the neck.
The Bleeding Tree won the 2014 Griffin Award for new Australian plays, and premiered at Griffin Theatre Company in 2015. It went on to win the Helpmann Award for best play, the NSW Premier's Literary Award, two Australian Writers' Guild Awards, a Sydney Theatre Award and a Green Room Award.
And it was picked up by Sydney Theatre Company for its 2017 season — which is where Hugo Weaving saw it, and decided he'd like to be in a Cerini play.
Dogs, dingoes and dead bodies
Weaving is currently performing in Sydney Theatre Company's production of Cerini's newest play, Wonnangatta, at the Roslyn Packer Theatre in Walsh Bay (STC's first production since the pandemic-induced Australia-wide theatre shutdown in March).
"It's a classic piece, already," Weaving told The Stage Show the week after the show opened.
Wonnangatta is a two-hander set in Victoria's alpine high country in early 1918. Weaving co-stars with Wayne Blair; the two play middle-aged men Harry and Riggall — who, as the play opens, have arrived at the remote cattle station of Wonnangatta to see what has happened to its manager, Jim Barclay, who is missing.
Barclay's dog is starving and neglected; the station cook, a man named Bamford, is nowhere to be seen; the dingoes are howling outside.
Wonnangatta is inspired by a real life double homicide that was never solved; Weaving's character is based on a close friend of Jim Barclay's who found the body: Harry Smith.
Blair's character is a composite of several real people, and named after William Riggall, who helped Smith raise the alarm when Barclay went missing.
Australian gothic
Jessica Arthur, directing Sydney Theatre Company's production of Wonnangatta, writes in her program note: "It seems to me that if The Bleeding Tree dramatises the outcome of the brutalising way we socialise men in this country, then Wonnangatta shows us the root of that process."
For while Cerini's play is ostensibly about two blokes hunting a missing person and a murderer in the bush, the greater threat is nature itself.
As Harry and Riggall grapple against the dense scrub, vertiginous terrain and wild weather, they are transformed.
In the dark of the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Weaving and Blair's heads often seem to float mid-air, suspended in darkness — thanks to Nick Schlieper's lighting design.
Combined with Jacob Nash's austere production design (a single, crescent-shaped wafer of metal, corrugated like tin, on which the men stand), and a reduced, socially-distanced audience, there's the sense of 'campfire ghost story' to the occasion.
The actors flip between telling the story to the audience and being 'in character'; when in character, sometimes the two men are having a conversation — but other times they appear stuck in their own heads, processing the action as it unfolds.
As in The Bleeding Tree, Cerini writes in a poetic vernacular; Harry and Riggall's expressions are authentically 'country Australia', but their words are arranged with a rhythm and rhyme that is like verse.
HARRY: Note still scrawled in chalk on the door.
RIGGALL: Mail sitting unopened just like before.
HARRY: Two days difficult ride and the homestead untouched, just like before.
RIGGALL: "Home tonight'
HARRY: Is what it reads.
RIGGALL: Same as before?
HARRY: Same as before.
The two actors are on stage for about 90 minutes, talking almost non-stop — and tasked with hitting the rhythm and cadence of the script.
"It's been a very complex, very challenging process of getting on top of the text — but a thrilling one," said Weaving.
Blair said every show is "a mini grand final".
"It's one of the hardest things I've ever done!" he told The Stage Show.
'A love story to Australia'
The alpine high country depicted in Wonnangatta is close to Cerini's heart: growing up, he spent a lot of time in the north-east of Victoria, and "most school holidays [and] every second weekend at least" in the town of Jamieson, where his family had an old miner's shack.
"That's where I would have first heard the story of the Wonnangatta mystery," Cerini says.
He and his three siblings played by the Jamieson River, and went on long bushwalks with their father.
During one of these, he had an experience that remains vivid in his memory — and inspired a climactic scene in Wonnangatta.
"I was only I think in about grade 4 or 5, and we went to a place called Lake Tali Karng, a natural lake deep in the high country. As we were bushwalking, the weather was nice — and then within a couple of hours, it was snowing, and so foggy I couldn't see my hand in front of my face — it was quite terrifying. We ended up in this cattleman's hut."
With hindsight, he says, perhaps he was more scared than he needed to be — but his child's perspective of awe at the natural environment has remained.
"What I love is the power of that environment," he says.
"Soldier-settlers were told after the war [World War I], if you take this land and clear it — chop down everything and start being productive — we'll give it to you. But if you don't chop the trees down, you've gotta give it back. So you see this environmental savagery on an enormous scale — on a continent-wide scale."
He feels that between droughts, floods, bushfires and the pandemic, nature's dominance is more evident now than ever.
"It doesn't matter whether we think climate change is real or not, or whether we think we should do more backburning or more tree clearing to change bushfire behaviour — all of that's kind of irrelevant, because at the end of the day, we persistently refuse to accept that the planet, and nature, will do whatever the f*** she wants," says Cerini.
And in his play, nature does indeed seem to fight back.
"It's maybe a little bit of a love story to Australia."
'Difficult second album'
In 2017, Cerini was living in Victoria's high country — on his remote property in Strathbogie Ranges, north of Melbourne.
"I live on 50 acres at the end of a no-through road, surrounded by bush and paddocks, with the closest house over a kilometre away," he says.
He moved there because it was affordable, and he is working on developing it into a garlic farm — with the dream of a reliable income flow. But it also seems to suit him temperamentally.
"I literally see no-one, and that's how I like it," he says.
When STC came calling for a follow-up to The Bleeding Tree, it was gratifying — but Cerini quickly found himself in "difficult second album" territory, and slightly gobsmacked by Weaving's interest.
Then his father, who had moved to the Strathbogie Ranges at the age of 60, got sick.
"We started talking, and I borrowed one of his books — Cattlemen and Huts of the High Plains, by Harry Stephenson — and it was then that I read, again, about the Wonnangatta murders," he recalls.
He dug deeper into that niche, buying books, researching further.
In August 2018, something clicked into place: "In half an hour, I wrote the first 30 pages".
STC's literary manager, Polly Rowe, was keen, and Cerini proposed using the development-funding portion of the David Williamson Prize, which he had won in 2016 for The Bleeding Tree, towards getting the play up at STC.
Rowe came on as dramaturg, helping to shape the script with Cerini, and across two years, three 'developments' of the work occurred; Arthur was attached to direct, then Weaving to star, followed by Blair.
(He'd never seen either actor perform live before).
"At one point, I just stayed in Sydney in this weird, awful hotel room — those environments are great to write in, because it's just brown. And so I punched out a complete draft."
While Cerini was writing, his father died, and he moved back in with his mum, in Melbourne.
"It was a weird time," he says.
Whereas the first draft of The Bleeding Tree had been — astoundingly — written in a few hours (in bed one morning, no less), Wonnangatta has been "the hardest thing I've done," says Cerini.
Ballet and Aussie blokes
Cerini made his name with works about violent young men — from Recidivist in 1997 and its follow-ups Dennis is Dead and Fuckwit (1998), to the award-winning Wretch (2009).
Most of his works have in one way or another put the darker aspects of male behaviour under the lens, from child abuse (Saving Henry) to the particularly male urges that fuel trade in sex, drugs and guns (Resplendence).
And then there was The Bleeding Tree, in which a community comes together around the murder of a wife-beater.
To watch these plays, or listen to him talk, you wouldn't suspect that Cerini studied ballet from age 6 to 16 — or that he advocates government funding for classical ballet and opera (not so much for Shakespeare, however).
He grew up the youngest of four kids, none of them into sport. His older sister wanted to do ballet — and then his older brothers felt they should be included. At six, Cerini was signed up by default.
The incident on the train, in 1996, was clearly a catalyst to him writing — and writing about violence, and men.
But he'd also done a lot of living between ballet at 16 and the creative arts degree in 1996.
Here's how he summarises those in-between years: "I just smoked a lot of bongs, got into quite a bit of trouble, and then went to uni [an arts degree at Monash] and lasted a semester, and then flipped steaks for three years, and smoked a lot more bongs."
He laughs through this checklist, but also speaks with seriousness about the intersection of mental health issues and drugs in young people: "We [need to] say to people hey listen, if you have history in your family of mental illness, maybe be careful smashing cones — because you've got a propensity."
Once he discovered theatre and writing, and once he opened the pandora's box of male violence, it proved a rich seam: homophobic violence, sexual violence, self-violence.
I ask him why he keeps turning a lens on the worst parts of men's behaviour, and he says: "Maybe we want to be better. Maybe I want to be better."
Poetry and masculinity
Growing up in the outer-Melbourne suburb of Vermont (right at the edge of the city, where the map turns from grey to a green expanse) Cerini says he felt outside 'Australian masculinity' — as one might imagine of someone into ballet, not sport.
"But I also know that I have at times been in that masculinity," he adds.
This inside/outside-ness is writ large in the characters of Harry and Riggall: one is a capable, confident country bloke who is all about action and taking control and getting on with it; the other is more circumspect, less sure — more wary of danger, and more questioning.
These two modes of masculinity rub up against each other, not always comfortably — and shape the action of Wonnangatta.
"And maybe these two [characters] are trying to articulate a way of communicating."
For Weaving and Blair, one of the biggest acts of magic Cerini has undertaken is to give voice — literally — to these men.
Weaving describes Harry as a "man who doesn't really need much other than himself; he relies on his own wits, and he relies on his own experience, and he'd rather not talk ... [but] we do talk a lot, we talk endlessly [in the play]."
He compares Cerini's use of language to bush poets like Banjo Patterson and C.J. Dennis.
"There's a real beauty in the zen Aussie man, when he gets to express what he feels — and I think Angus taps into that really beautifully, and that's the thrilling aspect of this — the poetry that's inside these fairly [withheld men]."
A different kind of theatre
Ballet has been crucial to how Cerini makes and writes theatre; even when he's not on stage performing, it's somehow embedded in the words he is writing.
"I'm really into dance — I love it. In many ways I prefer it to plays," he admits.
"Dance gives you this thing to figure out yourself ... it's not definite, it could mean lots of things, and that's what's beautiful about it ... the physicality is the thing. Whereas in a play, you've got a whole lot of stipulations so you know exactly what's going on — they're telling you everything."
"That's quite prescriptive — you don't get that chance to really dream or imagine, as you do in dance."
In 2011, he parlayed his dissatisfaction with main-stage theatre into the play Save for Crying, which he describes as an experiment.
He explains: "I see a lot of plays that are people chatting on stage in a lounge room — and to me, that's the death of art ... It doesn't embrace performance, right? It may as well be on TV.
"So I set about trying to create language that would be specifically for the live performance. So in that way, it's a bit of a dance and a bit of theatre … you're kind of enjoying the words for the qualities of the words, not just what they mean."
If Save for Crying was an experiment, it seems to have been successful. Cerini's next play was The Bleeding Tree.
The show must go on
The year 2020 has been another of those 'best and worst of times' for Cerini: he missed attending the biggest opening night of his career, due to COVID-19 travel restrictions and quarantine procedures.
He lost income from productions of The Bleeding Tree that were scheduled and then cancelled in Adelaide and Hobart (although at time of writing, a production was in rehearsals and preparing to open at Hobart's Theatre Royal, and Adelaide's Theatre Republic are set to open their production in December — both later than scheduled).
But he also opened the biggest show of his career, on one of the biggest theatre stages, with one of the country's premier theatre companies, with Hugo Weaving and Wayne Blair.
"What do you do after that?" he says, incredulous. "It's big. It's awesome. It's gobsmacking."
"My mother is very proud."
Wonnangatta is at Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney, until October 31.
The Bleeding Tree is at Hobart's Theatre Royal from November 12-28; and Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute (Adelaide) from December 9-19.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMib2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTEwLTI1L2FuZ3VzLWNlcmluaS1wbGF5d3JpZ2h0LWludGVydmlldy13b25uYW5nYXR0YS10aGUtYmxlZWRpbmctdHJlZS8xMjgwODA4MNIBJ2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMjgwODA4MA?oc=5
2020-10-24 20:00:00Z
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