How would you react if a teacher came to your door and told you your child had desecrated a mosque? That they'd betrayed the core values you'd instilled in them? We might raise our children to be free-thinking, independent individuals, but that generally assumes an acceptance of fundamental beliefs.
Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith is fascinated by questions of identity. Her play Fury revolves around a liberal-minded, educated couple grappling with this scenario as it sends shockwaves through their world. Staged by Red Stitch, the play was originally commissioned in 2013 by Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton for the Sydney Theatre Company.
Writing was always a career path in Joanna Murray-Smith's mind. Credit: Chris Hopkins
"What happens when our intelligent, loveable, seemingly well-balanced, engaged, communicative children just decide they don't agree with us on something fundamental?" she asks.
We are dining at her favourite Kenzan, the stalwart Japanese restaurant in Collins Place. It's sake don for me and sashimi with salmon for her, with prawn dumplings to share.
One of Australia's best-known playwrights, Joanna Murray Smith, is fascinated by questions of identity.Credit: Chris Hopkins
Aged 56, Murray-Smith has written 22 plays, three novels (one shortlisted for the Miles Franklin), a few librettos and some television, as well as two films. Is it a strong work ethic that makes her so prolific?
"I wish it was an ethic. It's kind of like emotional scaffolding because I'm happy when I'm writing," Murray-Smith says. "One of the good things about getting older is working out what you need for your equilibrium. For some people it's about time, for some space, for some people it's about friends or travel or whatever. I think for me writing is therapeutic."
She feels there are lots of stories to tell and not enough time to tell them and credits her parents with instilling that idea. Her father, writer and historian Stephen Murray-Smith, was a lecturer at Melbourne University and founded the literary magazine Overland. Her mother, Nita Bluthal, whose Jewish family emigrated from Poland to escape World War II, became a teacher of English and history.
"My father was a workaholic, but it wasn't because he valued the notion of working hard, it was because he valued what he could accomplish in the time available ... so I think that was just inherited really.
Joanna Murray Smith dines at Kenzan Japanese Restaurant.Credit: Chris Hopkins
"I feel like there isn't a moment to lose. I want my own life to have a big narrative, I want it to be a big story, so I better get cracking!"
For Murray-Smith, it was a given that writing could be a career path. "It would never have occurred to me that it was unrealistic. Which now I think, how weird, what a bubble I was living in."
Joanna Murray-Smith soon after her play 'Honour' was first staged.Credit: Fairfax Media
Her first play, Honour, written in 1995, has been staged in dozens of countries and on Broadway and in the West End, with leads including Julia Blake, Meryl Streep and Diana Rigg. Its themes of love and loss, lust and fidelity are timeless and cross all cultures. Similar ideas were revisited in Three Little Words, which dealt with the repercussions of a marriage breakdown and premiered for the MTC last year.
Questions around the human condition and how to navigate life are her preoccupations, not that she wants to prescribe any particular way to be.
The Sake Don at Kenzan Japanese Restaurant. Credit: Chris Hopkins
"Even as an audience member I want to be encouraged to experience something that makes me think, but I don't want to be told what to think. I'm very intolerant of anything didactic in art," she says. "I find ambiguity much more interesting."
While designed to get audiences thinking, her plays are also funny. "Not enough is said about entertainment - it's almost an oppositional word to extending or illuminating or provoking."
The Ebi Shumai at Kenzan Japanese Restaurant. Credit: Chris Hopkins
The idea of cultural appropriation, that white writers shouldn't write black characters, for example, she finds ridiculous. "It's our job to imagine our way into people who aren't us. And the process of writing is about investing invented people with our own humanity, both the flaws and strengths of who we are. And the audience will be the judge of whether we get it right or wrong."
There's a push now for playwrights to note in stage directions when characters can be cast blind to their racial background: "Because if you don't note it, they will invariably be cast white."
Joanna Murray Smith at the Sydney Theatre Company in 2013.Credit: Jacky Ghossein
Growing up, surrounded by interesting, argumentative characters, she was privy to the adult world; it was captivating. "My parents were intellectuals, they were big thinkers, their friends were big talkers and very opinionated, they argued a lot, always good-natured, but listening to those voices as a child, even though I didn't understand the content, I could follow the balance of power."
Her mother took her to the theatre, the opera and the ballet often, which instilled a love of the performing arts. While there are countless aspiring novelists in Australia, the number of people writing plays is far smaller. Does she believe in quotas for female playwrights? In the long run, yes, but she says the support of women has to be meaningful and long-term.
Receipt for lunch with Joanna Murray-Smith
In the critical culture, she argues, there's still a sense that only men can be geniuses, that women "get lucky with a play".
"You have to train yourself to withstand the knocks and find the resilience ... I have to keep in mind the thought ... that audiences will love it. Whether that happens or not, you have to trick yourself as a writer to believe that or you'd never have the faith to do it."
The advent of social media has added to the pressure on young and emerging writers. It's also created a didactic forum for discussion, a long way from the reasoned, wide-ranging debates of the playwright's childhood.
In the wake of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, Murray-Smith's hunch is that we're seeing a seismic social shift. "There are certainly people – actors in particular – who have gotten away with murder for years and years and years. Because there's a kind of charisma attached [to them]."
That said, she wants to see a more nuanced conversation about the issues. "What worries me, which is controversial, is that if there isn't enough subtlety applied to gradations of bad behaviour – if a pat on the bum is put in the same league as serious assault, there'll be a big backlash," she says. "Women should still hold on to some agency in terms of dealing with minor, irritating and impertinent behaviour by men. When Catherine Deneuve came out and said, 'It's taken all the fun away' ... it's controversial, but a part of me agreed ... I like men flirting with me, flirt away, please do."
Murray-Smith is married to writer and publisher Ray Gill; their children are 23, 17 and 13. Last year she spent a few months in Paris with her daughter, the youngest, and she has just been to Kakadu with the oldest. She loved "being liberated from the drudgery".
One-on-one time with children is very important. "It gives them that moment to shine with you. And it's money in the love bank."
Not many people have the opportunity to spend such time away, which segues neatly into the main criticism traditionally levelled at her work, that it deals only with the middle class. She says it is not an issue outside Australia. "I think there's an awareness that it's a very limited and rather superficial analysis of a story. It's the humanity of the characters, it's the quality of the storytelling and it's the insights into the human condition. Look at the kings and queens Shakespeare wrote about, the doctors Chekhov wrote about, the restaurateurs David Hare wrote about."
Bryan Brown approached her to write the film Palm Beach, currently being shot, in which he stars and produces. ("He is gorgeous and I love him, but we had lots of fights, it was a feisty collaboration.")
Directed by Brown's wife, Rachel Ward, it's a comedy-drama about a group of 50-somethings; the cast includes Jacqueline McKenzie, Greta Scacchi and Sam Neill. Film scripts generally go through several stages, because of casting, funding or producers' input. "With a bit of luck you still like what you end up with, but I find it hard to believe any scriptwriter doesn't think that their earlier draft was better," she says with a laugh.
Murray-Smith says Brown plays a more emotionally vulnerable character than he has traditionally in Palm Beach. "That comes quite naturally to him because I think that's part of the ageing process. We do get more vulnerable as we get older, and I think that's probably true for me as a writer. We just know more about people and that gives us an empathy and a softness that you don't have as much when you are younger."
Fury is at Red Stitch from May 29 to July 1.
The bill, please
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