In the end we had to settle on a dark and stormy night. It was nobody’s first preference, but between my recommendation of talking before an large open fire surrounded by wolfhounds bearing trays of exotic cocktails, and Patrick’s insistence that we hold the interview in the heart a dying sun, well, a compromise had to be reached. Nor was I fully able to satisfy every item on his list of demands, or make good on my promise to cover his sitting fee (as he used to always say in those days before the ‘bear malfunction’ that claimed his vocal chords, “Standing and talking are all well and good, but sitting down is gonna cost you.”). Some items were easier than others. A scarf with a picture of a giraffe, for Patrick is nothing if not foremost a poet. A sprig of jasmine. The promise never to look inside his left ear. Others, like a fourth-edition copy of a yet-to-be-released Jonathan Franzen novel proved slightly less linear and, therefore, more difficult. Yet as outlandish as these requests were – rice pudding served in Bob Carr’s shoe, as prepared by Mrs Carr – you never doubted that together they would serve some purpose, that Patrick Lenton marched to the beat of a different fish and would utilise these things in ways hitherto unimagined by men of science or arts. That was his strength, you see (again, this was all prior to the Yogi Incident), to rearrange the world and present it as something unique. Something familiar and new.
So we met at The Clare Hotel, a Sydney pub more reminiscent of a university share-house that an actual bar. We were both running late, so by the time either of us arrived we were both waiting for ourselves impatiently. In customary fashion I had forgotten the dark and Patrick had forgotten the storm, so we settled on a removed corner hidden beyond a bank of unused poker machines. Over the course of the interview, despite the fact that each machine remained unattended, one would periodically explode in the overwhelming fanfare of a jackpot having been just won. I suspect in the depths of their loneliness this is how poker machines talk to each other.
Patrick was his usual fashionable self, all unkempt-windswept hair and jaunty limbs. One might happily call him lanky. One might unhappily also call him lanky, though you would do so in a more subdued tone. We had decided to meet to discuss his upcoming play, Sexy Tales of Paleontology, and reflect over his body. Of work. Ah ha, yes, body of work. It’s not like his torso is made out of mirrors or anything, that’d be weird.
Adam: I’m here with Patrick Lenton, interviewing him for the upcoming season of Sexy Tales of Paleontology, but I figure for those unfamiliar with Mr Lenton’s opus so far we’d go back to basics and talk about your time in The Bracket Creeps, Australia’s first Awesome Poetry Boy Band. Apart from the fact there was an obvious gap in the poetry boy band market, how did it come about?
Patrick Lenton: Well you know, crawling out of the primordial ooze, we were all studying creative writing at the University of Wollongong and all had the great fortune to be studying under the tutelage of Van Badham, the powerhouse of theatre as they call her, the tsunami, ah …
A: I have indeed heard of her described as a tsunami before.
P: Yes, well, she’d been teaching us and decided one day during one of her inscrutable whims that we should up and form a poetry boy band. There was no, “Have you guys ever thought about forming a boy band before?”, or “Are you even interested in poetry?”, no. We got very drunk one night, and I woke up the next morning next to my girlfriend and said, “Bridget … am I in a poetry boy band?” And she said something like, “I think you are, shut up!” And that’s literally how it came about, and because Van never does anything by halves, not even by three-quarters, she had us a gig booked by the next day. So suddenly, what once was four jerks just doing shit was given a time limit, and …
A: These four jerks being yourself, Lachlan Williams, Jimmy Andrews and Daniel East.
P: That’s right. And everyone used their real names except me, I was Tad. I don’t know why, I just needed an alter ego.
A: To protect your real identity during the day?
P: Ha, it actually came about because during the first day of one of Van’s classes I came late, and she asked me a question and when I went to answer she screamed “Who are you?”, and I went “…Uhhhh …” To which she said, “What? Tad?” And from then on, I was Tad.
A: Ha, and it’s from such inauspicious beginnings we now have you here today.
P: Yep. Primordial ooze (laughs)
A: Your character in the Creeps was pitched as the wacky one, the most absurd, and this seems to now be a quality that is present in the majority of your writing, both on and off stage. I’m thinking the short story “Uncle Jeremy has Turned into a Tree”. What is it that draws you to the outlandish, to the surreal?
P: I think that I … the absurd has something to it, it looks from afar to be a complete chaotic mess of utter meaninglessness, right? But then, what everyone does in their life, they start picking apart the chaos, the absurd, and looking at bits of it kind of up close with a microscope and go, “Well, actually if you look at it, democracy actually does make sense”, or, you know, corporate business, or why people wear hats, it might make perfect sense. But! The beauty of absurdism is that if you have a little bit more time, you look close and you realise that nothing makes sense in the slightest. And that’s not a terrifying thing, it’s actually comforting, because when you realise that when there’s no rhyme or reason you get to go beyond the horrors of predestination, or Divine Will, all things that can make you feel incredibly impressed … wait … oppressed, not impressed. And so absurdism is not just a laziness, or a “Chrooooooaa, I’m awash in a sea of confusion!”, it’s actually, “I’m awash in a sea of philosophical confusion, and I like it!”
A: I find that a lot of genre fiction deals with that, genres like horror, where there is the chance to draw out a lot of the anxiety or worried frenzy that you find in the everyday, and you find a way of expressing it, either through the absurd, the outlandish or the horrific. There’s an almost cathartic way of addressing these things.
P: Yeah. And it’s something that will illustrate parts of your life and therefore make most situations very relevant to people. I’m talking about this from a writer’s point of view, where a lot of the time I’ll see comedy and it will be funny, but, there’s no connection to it, I find I don’t believe in these people, I don’t believe in their situation. Whereas the absurdist way of looking at things, well, everyone’s had that moment where they just up and leave their life, sure this just can’t be real, you know, “Surely this can’t have happened to me.” It’s that day where not only do you crash your car but a fucking seagull impales a passing cyclist. It’s where it pushes it beyond the point of the story you have to tell, the “You’ll never believe what happened to me”. And that’s what I like to write.
A: So you expect that there’s a level of escapism in these genres that your audience will identify with, will lose themselves in?
P: Yes, yes. I enjoy the escapism of comedy, I’m not particularly in the market of reminding everyone how awful things are, you know. I don’t pay $20 to find out about the horrors of my situation…
A: …How futile human existence is after all…
P: “Oh Jesus! That’s right! I forgot there’s no point to anything!”
A: “And I’m down twenty bucks!”
P: “Shit! Now I have to go home …” I really love it when I go out for a night and just have moments of complete escapism, complete hilarity, complete fantasy, and that’s what entertainment’s about, and that’s what I try to create. And theatre used to be about entertainment. A lot of the times now you’ll hear people say “Theatre should be about confronting people with their deepest, darkest fears, really explore the inner psyche.” No, no, that’s my psychiatrist, not my theatre.
A: We’ve seen you act before in the Bracket Creeps, and you’re behind the scenes now with your writing. Any desire to appear onstage again? Can you see yourself ever appearing in one of your own plays?
P: Yeah, I can … I’ve done a bit of stand-up here and there, kind of as an experiment to see what people like, and it didn’t go too bad. It’s obviously not my passion though, writing is the passion. My drama teacher in Year Ten once said to me “It’s very strange, Patrick. You’re the most confident person I’ve seen on the stage in a long time, you just love being up there. But my God you can’t act.” And it’s really true, I can’t act, I can’t get up there and be other people. I do love being on stage, and I do love speaking comedy, but I think it’s the difference between a performer and an actor. You’re not going to have me filling the role of a thirteen year old cripple on a spaceship. I can’t be that role. I can certainly parody it though. But I think there’s certainly going to be points in the future where I’ll forget about how shit I am and go back on stage.
A: Could you see yourself then ever writing or performing a purely dramatic role, given what we’ve seen so far have been very exaggerated versions of yourself? Do you think you could pull off strictly realist theatre?
P: My … Hmmm. I have this kind of feeling that when I’m like forty-five I’ll be one of those staples of the strange theatre / comedy community, you know, people will like who I am and I’ll have worked on a couple of things, you know, I’d have gone on Good News Week … and what would happen is, some retard will say [in a somehow surreal, peat-boggish accent that Patrick evidently associates with retardation] “Would you like to be in this movie I’ve made about the … Eureka Stockade and you’d be playing the … err …”
A: The stockade.
P: Ha, “You’d be playing the stockade, you’d have to be very resilient, can you do that Patrick?” And I’d be like, bah, fuck it, sure! – Cause by then I’d have a sixteen month hard opium addiction – and I’d get up there and be widely panned for it, there’d be David and Margaret, “I can’t see why that got Patrick Lenton to be the stockade,” and, “Ooooh I liked him David, he was so very fresh, he was so very stationary!” “No, no, his emotion, he was, he was so very …”
A: Wooden?
P: (Laughs) Yep.
A: So you’re a well established Kurt Vonnegut and, as I discovered recently, John Barthes fan, both who are considered to be very erudite and often profound authors that are also described, in a sometimes positive way, as being “playful”. How much of an influence have these authors been in your own approach to writing in that, they don’t take themselves so seriously, they’re still trying to maintain the sheer fun in writing and reading?
P: Absolutely, they were a huge influence on me, especially when I was being taught writing at university. I remember once towards the beginning of uni, a comment on a story that I’d failed from a certain Mr. Tony Macris said something like “Try writing this with the gritty urban realism of Don DeLilo”. And you know, I like Don DeLilo, I read Don DeLilo all the time. I have no desire to write like Don DeLilo though, and I went through this period of utter torture just trying to write this kind of “A man is walking down the street and he doesn’t know where he is and oh look, there’s a nun!” Everything just turned out to be really boring absurdism because I wasn’t able to do that kind of realism. And reading Vonnegutt you just find this utter irreverence for any kind of tumultuous story … I mean you can’t get to a point where he’ll stop being irreverent, he’ll always have that there. And that was brilliant, it was like, “Huh, you know what Kurt Vonnegutt, you sound like a crazy old man speaking in my ear.”
A: Which is interesting given you mentioned that the Armageddon in Retrospect collection you didn’t like as much given that he came across more preachy than he once was, that he reached a point in his old age where had started to bitch and moan about the state of things rather than show the wry, charming reflections that he had been renowned for.
P: In the context it was [directed to] someone who was asking what the first Vonnegut they should read would be, to which I’ll always recommend one of his actual novels. Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, Bluebeard, I’ll always say go to one of those. And then, look, eat him up, because everything he’s written is gold. But there is a point where he hasn’t … somewhere after Timequake – and even there to a certain extent – he just is being retrospective, he’s repeating himself, including old speeches, saying over and over again things that he’s already illustrated in his novels. He always said that the one thing he felt he was meant to write was Slaughterhouse Five, and it took him a long time to write it, and if you look into it, it basically says everything he ever needed to say. Everything since then has been reiteration and pointing back to that, like, “You know what I meant with this? Well this is what the same thing means in today’s society.” He’s saying exactly the same thing. So, I still enjoyed Armageddon in Retrospect, but it’s literally just retrospection on his entire career.
A: I guess it’s one of the common criticisms that are levelled against any kind of artist, that once they reach a certain prominence in their field and try to carry on they tend to be accused of rehashing the same thing again and again, they haven’t made any new points, they’re just remoulding old material. Is that a fear of yours, that one day you’ll reach a point and realise, “I have nothing new here, all I wanted to say I said very succinctly in Play X and the rest will be much of the same.”
P: Sure, constantly. Everything from the first thing I’ve written maybe I’ve had the one idea that said everything and I have nothing else to say. Ha, well, people keep accusing me of actually saying nothing, so, you just grind your teeth.
A: Well they said the same thing about Beckett as well, Godot being the play where nothing happens twice, so you’ll be keeping good company in the very least.
P: Ha, maybe. I think there are universal themes that are infinitely reinterpreted and if you brought out all writing – all good writing – they are infinite reinterpretations of the one theme. You can break it down further – and that’s basically what I was taught over two degrees to do, to break things down to the utter stale minutiae, “Oooo, this is obviously about the … psychological impact of … mmmm … motherhood on orphan pillars, pillars without a father, without a roof…” But if you look at it after stepping back you’ll see it’s actually just about two pillars coming together, holding up a roof.
A: That’s a real story of the human condition you have there.
P: And living in it!
A: So let’s talk about Implausible People, which developed from your involvement in the 2007 Short ‘n’ Sweet and turned into your first full length play. Did you get the sense after seeing that staged that, “I can do this, I have put on a play, this is something that I can actually keep doing”?
P: It was even stranger than that because I’d come to university to be a prose writer, that was my goal and is something that continues to be a goal there’s always The Novel. It was just to fill up credit points that I started studying theatre, there was a kind of juvenile resistance of “Pffft, theatre? Looks like I’m going to learn about One Woman’s Tale of the Holocaust, a monologue that stretches three hours and includes a lot of giant hand gestures.” But, I started writing it and found I loved it, through Short ‘n’ Sweet and a couple of smaller things around university, got a good response … and then, really from out of the blue, was asked to do Implausible People from the interview for Short ‘n’ Sweet, once again by Van Badham and the Gemeinschaft Dogs Theatre Company. And everything about it was very hurried, very rushed. I had to write the first draft in three days while I was performing with The Bracket Creeps in Launceston, so they were kind of odd circumstances. And then after the first draft we had three weeks until the actual show had to be on, and it was only because of such amazing people that I was working with that the show actually happened. But everything about it was a real … more than a confidence boost, I was thrust into it, I had to believe that I could do it or there was no chance, it was completely outlandish. And then once it had happened it was like, “Well, I got to put a show on and I wrote it in three days. I guess I can pretty much do anything from now on.” Which, you know, of course isn’t true, I’ve since been challenged a million times and have now learned that I know very little. But! Implausible People was a brilliant debut to be able to, well …
A: As you say, hell of a confidence booster.
P: Absolutely. And working with Sophie Webb and Anthony Hunt was when I found out that if you have some amazing actors to work with, you can write for them, and that’s an amazing gift for a writer when you know that an actor can form a particular role. I mean, they came to that play – once I’d met them, once they’d started rehearsing – and it was no longer something I did in the dark corner of a room while drunk at 3am, it was actually something where, “I can see Anthony Hunt doing this, this is brilliant, he IS this character.” And that’s what I love about theatre, that collaborative process. It’s not just the writer in his ivory tower, it’s the writer in his ivory tower with a whole bunch of other people and having a really cool time.
A: So how then did the collaborative experience in Implausible People, where you had these actors that you knew compare to your work on Stories from the 428, a larger canvas with many directors, many writers and actors involved?
P: Stories from the 428 was a pretty unique experience for a writer. I got to suckle [I have listened to the tape innumerable times, and I swear that’s what he says] from the mastermind behind that, where she gathered two weeks worth of writers, eight writers in each week, she made them go on the 428 bus from Circular Quay to Canterbury. And we had to submit the play within twenty-four hours after being on that bus. We just had to be inspired by the bus trip, there was no other stipulation…
A: For the record, I should probably quote at this point that we currently have another member of The Bracket Creeps who has just arrived, stroking his chin and looking thoughtful over our shoulders …
Lachlan Williams: Are you discussing our glory days?
P: I’ve gone all the way back to our primordial ooze days!
L: There are some who say we should never have climbed out of that swamp, that our rudimentary hind legs were a mistake; that the decision to come down out of the trees was altogether ill-advised.
A: From what I gather you all still have the giant promotional posters of yourselves…
P: Yeah, they’re a bit mouldy, but they’re in my garage.
L: This entire interview has in fact been conducted in Patrick’s garage where three of the Bracket Creeps are bound up, all artificially moulded…
A: It’s very Dorian Grey, we’re hoping that by preserving these posters we’ll ensure your immortality.
P: Except for East who escaped to Korea and now eats poo.
L: Poo?
A: Now eats poo. He also contracted E Coli
L: East Coli?
A: Sure.
L: So what have you been doing in Korea East Oh My God …
(Laughter)
At this point, former Bracket Creeps manager Daniel Willis also arrives.
Willis: Food for thought from the men’s room wall – “Your penis makes me sad.”
P: I saw that.
L: It’s an extension from that line about an old sea hag.
P: The Penis Poems?
A: See, these are the hazards that you try to prepare for when you conduct an interview in a very popular cheap pub in Sydney, people just start wandering up to you spouting urinal graffiti…
P: We should point out that this is actual one of our old managers and not a hobo.
L: Who now has a three month old child.
W: I manage children! (Takes an impressive draught of beer) Please don’t arrest me.
Lachlan and Willis slowly amble away, disappearing into the depths of The Claire, muttering to themselves about children and penises. It occurs to me that if the wrong person overhears, they may well be arrested at this stage. Or perhaps that should be the right person overhearing, who knows how such distinctions work these days?
A: Alright. To continue with the actual interview. Erm. Let’s see. Ah hell, moving right along. You have a pretty consistent blend of pop-culture references and allusions that come up in your writing. There are these megalomaniacal personalities, dinosaurs, robots, all this great stuff that harks back to 1950’s atomic cinema. How would you respond to the charge that your writing is purely derivative, that what you’re giving us is comfort food for an audience only concerned with the familiar, something they won’t be challenged by. Laughter by rote, I guess.
P: Haha, well, I find in my audience that there aren’t a lot of people from the 1950’s. Well, we did have that time-travelling craze a couple of years back where you just couldn’t stop them, [puts on eccentric British history professor voice] “Oh look, we’re going back to the futuuuuure!”, you know, in their hover cars and hover chairs. I have to say, the 1950’s audience were less than impressed.
A: I’m still waiting on my hover skateboard, Michael J Fox has a lot to answer for.
P: But otherwise, I don’t particularly think that I’m doing anything too derivative. Maybe there are a bunch of people out there who are writing things exactly like me, and I’m not actually new or fresh. Maybe I just don’t realise there’s this rich tapestry behind me, and if only I’d done one or two literature courses in my time … Christ, I just didn’t know! Oh God …
A: See, I don’t think what you’re doing is particularly derivative at all, especially with the culture we’re in now, where I think audiences are struggling to find hilarious material when they’re bombarded with so many options. I think it’s harder to be funny now than it ever has been before because there’s so much out there and it’s so accessible. To make an audience laugh now and to have the hilarity and success – which you’ve so far enjoyed – speaks not of being derivative, I think, if anything it’s demonstrating the old in a new and absurd fashion.
P: Yeah. And I mean, we are a postmodern people. We are fully aware of what we’re working with or working against, of the possibility of things not changing, and the feeling that we probably don’t have anything new. Like how fashion happens over and over again, “Oh look, boat hats are back in fashion,” you know. But I think all that is actually bullshit. We are a very short-lived people who can be constantly amazed at the things we’re doing, it’s human nature, and I think absurdism does create a timelessness. There is absurdity in every single thing we do, and so much comedy has this timelessness. But in the minutia of day-to-day there are always changes that make everything new. And the other thing is, we don’t learn. Really. We’re very grateful to learn the same lesson over and over again because we don’t ever really take it in. And that’s really what comedy does, since Aristophanes we’ve been doing satires of how our societies work in order to learn and hopefully move on. But it’s all still basically the same.
A: Offhand, who would be some of your favourite contemporary comics?
P: Whoa. Well, I assume you mean away from the literary side?
A: Well, not necessarily. In general who are the humorists, the satirists who you find most notable today?
P: This could be misdirection but I’m going to go for it anyway. I really like Wil Ferrel’s movies. Not all of them, that’s probably important to mention, but Blades of Glory and Anchorman are honestly two of the funniest things I have ever seen in my entire life, they’re just ridiculously good and use humour in ways that I think are quite clever. Being clever with humour is a big challenge in movies and tv. Black Books, hilarious, but even funnier is Green Wing, another British comedy show, though to my regret I’m not entirely sure who the creative masterminds behind that were [a group of writers, but principally led by Victoria Pile], but it changed my life yet alone the way I write, my ideas of what you can do in television, you know?
A: Did you ever watch any Big Train?
P: No, no trains at all.
A: Similar style, similar humour but presented in sketch format and it’s just achingly hilarious. But before we run out of time, let’s talk about Sexy Tales, which already has a curious honour in that its title has been misspelt on more websites than any other play in recent memory. It’s another collaborative piece; you worked on it with your girlfriend Bridget Lutherburrow and with Daniel East, currently lost in the Himalayas somewhere, suffering from E Coli –
P: And eating poo.
A: - He just keeps eating poo. Tell us how it developed, how you feel about it.
P: Basically I came up with the concept of Sexy Tales of Paleontology – we spell it with an ‘e’ and an ‘o’ rather than the ‘aeo’, both are correct in the Macquarie Dictionary, but Microsoft Word in various versions would tag one of them as wrong, so there was never going to be any consistency in this play even from computer to computer – but I came up with the idea basically from the title, I just had this idea about sexy palaeontology, now what would that be about, well, I guess something to do with scientists. And I had wanted to write a full length play, so I approached Daniel East who was then on the dole and living in Wollongong. And he was all like, “Oh, I need some kind of purpose in life,” so I thought, well, what about a play? So we started writing that and we spent a long time writing, from a couple of humble beginnings to finally a humble midsection. Around halfway through, when we’d come up with a fairly substantial number of first scenes, not even first drafts but first scenes, we started doing more of the writing in my house which I share with Bridget. Now Bridget is absolutely hilarious and a wonderful writer herself, and she just started contributing more and more until neither East nor I could actually work without her. I mean, we tried, but there was something missing and it was Bridget, shouting in our ears these incoherent rambling sentences. Or like, we’d be trying to think of a name and she’d start shouting, “Matthew McConaughey! Matthew McConaughey”, and we just couldn’t shut her up until we put Matthew McConaughey in the play. We worked up a really simply formula. We’d come in, we’d try to meet around ten in the morning but someone would always be late so it would be around one in the afternoon by the time we actually sat down. Then we’d all have to talk about the hilarious things that happened that day – “Cooor, I had a dream I was being chased by a swamp monster and then I was chewing on a stool and the swamp monsters were coming and they had their own mothers hanging out of their faces” – and we’d say, yeah, yeah, that’s great East. And then at last we’d have a whole bunch of caffeine and say, well, what should we work on? And East would say, how about we write about dinosaurs? Yes! Yes! And we’d do that for a while until I’d remember there was quite a nice bottle of Riesling in my bag, and we’d just get really drunk.
A: The genesis of all great creative work.
P: Yeah, basically.
A: You’re also producer this time around. How has that affected your approach to the theatre?
P: It’s been a remarkable learning curve. So much of a curve it’s actually a dramatic spike. You start off thinking, “Oh, theatre, it’s kind of like walking over a hill!” Oh God no. It’s trekking. It basically happened because of the format as part of the inaugural Sydney Fringe Festival, and to get the show in we had to get back to grass roots and had to get a whole bunch of money. You don’t find producers out there who are like “Tra la la, here’s some money and I’ll work for free!” So this show being my “baby”, with East and Bridget helping to get the first draft done, from then on I was on my own because no one else wants to deal with the shit that comes afterwards, the redrafting, all the little parts of theatre that no one finds interesting. So basically it needed a certain amount of money to get into the Fringe, and the way that I ended up getting it there was through submitting to the Queen St Studios theatre development program which is called Off the Shelf, and Off the Shelf in particular had aimed at doing a development project with one theme, and from that one theme you got a whole bunch of industry feedback with the intention of sending it off the Fringe Festival. So it was almost a way of fast tracking it in, which is just great because it gives you a kind of preview of your show. So the producer part was essentially me throwing my pay-check into the project, which sucked as I don’t have a head for numbers, I quit maths in Year Ten and haven’t added anything up since. So when I thought, “Hey, how much money can actually go into a play? Can’t be that much”, turns out you have to pay thousands of dollars for rehearsal space…
A: Insurance.
P: My God, insurance, I haven’t even paid for that yet. I’m just gonna cry. And publicity, advertising. I’m not even going with print media this time around, because I don’t have the budget for it. I mean, right now we’re sitting in a pub which is literally floor to ceiling with posters of various bands, right? There are two hundred and ninety other plays in the Sydney Fringe Festival, all, I’m assuming, with posers. Even assuming I’m able to get the most eye-catching, fantastic poster for Sexy tales and can somehow get it around the city, it’s still competing with two hundred and ninety others who will be performing at the same time.
A: It’d really have to be one hell of a poster.
P: And that’s why I’m not going to do it! (Laughs) Fuck it! Can’t be done.
A: So you’re still in rehearsals now, you’re working with Laura Munroe, Shalane Connors, Alex Williams. How’s it coming along? I mean, I’m sure if you were really miserable with it you probably wouldn’t bring it up in an interview, but hey.
P: Ha, true. The cast are just spectacular, so full of energy and they’re working with our director Ann-Marie, they’ve just been fantastic. I’ll be in the rehearsal room and they’ll come in, and each time it’s brilliant. They’re so professional and they actually seem to love the script. You can tell because they seem to be having fun, and I always wanted it to be a fun show. It was fun writing it and I hope it’s fun acting in it ‘cause no one’s getting paid money for it so far. Really I couldn’t be happier, we had some trouble rounding up a full cast mostly because of availability. People are so busy that it’s hard getting time to settle into the rehearsal process for something as low budget as a Fringe show. People still need to earn money to live, to do their other jobs, auditions, all that kind of shit. The way I originally planned the show was to have four or five actors playing multiple roles, but we kind of ended up going with a bunch of actors playing just one role so they can have lots of development time. Now that I’ve seen it though I can’t imagine it any other way, each one of those actors has brought something really unique, something special to the role, and I just can’t wait to see it actually all come together on stage.
A: I’ve been hearing a lot of great things about the script. I know Laura and Shalane have been away from the stage for some time, but were so enamoured with the writing they’re back again. Given how well your work is being received, what’s going to be next?
P: Well, what I’d love to do is to work on an actual sketch-comedy show, that’s kind of the dream. There’s this kind of feeling with my plays of, “Ho ho ho, aren’t they funny!” and then you walk off. And well, my goal was to be funny but I want something a little bit more to come out of my theatre. I don’t know what that is, though. I’d love to do a sketch comedy show. Television, feature films. But what I’ve started to do is an internet sketch-comedy show. I’m going to use some of the people I’ve worked with on Sexy Tales, because I know that they’re great comic actors, and really go for a kind of Youtube comedy show. And there’re always a couple of plays, you know, kicking around.
A: You mentioned escapism earlier, and when I watch the films of, say, Tim Burton, I always get the sense that Burton is living vicariously through his characters, that his characters are put in situations where they can live out the impossible dreams that he can never have in real life. You’re wrestling with a werewolf, robbing banks with poets. How much of this comes into your fiction?
P: You know when … you’re in a certain situation and somebody insults you, and then three days later you think of the perfect come back. A lot of my plays are like that, in that the situations that I’ve been in are ridiculous in themselves – I almost don’t have to exaggerate them – but I’ll I’ve done is play along with the role and walk away after saying, “I can’t believe that just happened to me.” And therefore my plays have kind of been an illogical extension of the situation, where people don’t play their usual roles and, I suppose, extend it til it becomes more ridiculous than is possible. My first uni play, The Interview I wrote after a period of doing all these job interviews, where I went into one for this awful, dead-end retail job at a bottle shop. And everything was going really well, got my RSA, worked in a bottle shop before, I know what vodka is. And he says to me, “Where do you see yourself in ten years time?” And I said, “Doing something I love, hopefully.” And he looked at me. “You don’t see yourself in my shoes?” And I’m like, “What are your shoes?” “I’m the manager.” So I said, “Well, not really, no. I’m sure you have a great time but, I’ve got other things I want to do.” I didn’t get the job. And you know, that was mildly absurd, so The Interview came out of it with these ridiculous examples of that. In a way it’s me just wishing that I was not such a difficult person, and just able to go through life a bit more like the characters in my shows, to interact with the rules like they don’t matter. But unfortunately, you can’t really ignore the rules because that’s the way we survive. The way we get our money, live in our apartments, buy our food.
A: And I suppose in the interim it just means that it’s all the more reason for people to seek out absurd plays, where they can disappear into somewhere exotic and live vicariously, for however short a time.
P: Yeah, it’s catharsis. A lot of people probably have had that moment of being stuck in a job interview, and now you can finally have that realisation that “I’m not shit! It’s just a stupid situation, I am an implausible person!” Likewise for Sexy Tales. If you’re a palaeontologist … and sexy … Hmmm, that one doesn’t really work …
A: Well Patrick, it’s been splendid talking to you. I have absolutely no doubt the play will be a runaway success, runaway like some kind of beautiful, glittering train that will come off the rails and crash into some other train and there’ll be a shower of bodies –
P: Crashes into a glitter factory.
A: Precisely. Because that’s how these narratives run. Thank you for your time.
P: Thank you very much.
Sexy Tales of Paleontology runs September 16, 17, 18, 19, 24
Tickets available: http://thesydneyfringe.com.au/shows/sexy-tales-paleontology
The Genesian Theatre
