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 If what was happening today in Africa was happening in Sydney, how would you react? Lee Lewis, director of the new Stablemates play, Stoning Mary, speaks to Garrett Bithell.
Tony Blair once asserted that ‘if what was happening in Africa today was happening in any other part of the world, there would be such a scandal and clamour that governments would be falling over themselves to act in response’.
Introducing London-based writer Debbie Tucker Green to Sydney audiences for the first time, the second Stablemates play of 2008, Stoning Mary, which opened at the SBW Stables Theatre last Thursday, explores that premise. She seeks to challenge First World indifference to human suffering in Africa by taking stories from African newspaper articles and resetting them in our own cities with a cast of white characters.
“Her task was to take the big Africa questions and bring them home to a relatively safe theatre-going audience in London,” director Lee Lewis tells SX.
“How do you reach these people and make them think about this in different ways?
“So she’s made these stories unbelievably domestic and ordinary.”
Three interlocking stories follow a couple during an AIDS epidemic with only one prescription for the life-saving medication they both need between them; a mother and father whose child has been sent to war; and Mary – a young woman who is going to be stoned to death for exacting revenge on a murderer. Green encourages us to consider what our feelings and reactions would be if these horrific situations were all happening here and not on the other side of the world. Intangible atrocities we dismiss as being third-world are yanked from the sphere of global politics and thrust into the context of our own domestic lives.
“We are lucky to be able to be complacent,” Lewis says. “I think everyone who’s engaged with the creative arts in Australia knows that we have this complacency and that we’re very lucky to have it.
“But it’s a struggle to engage with the ‘big picture’ questions of the world because we still feel safe – the connection to the immediacy of these problems is not there. So it’s not a political play; it’s actually a really domestic play about these relationships – ordinary people that never thought these things would happen to them.”
Green is one of Britain’s most exciting new playwrights and her new play, Revolution, is currently on at the Royal Court Theatre in London. She won the 2004 Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer, and her other works include Dirty Butterfly, Born Bad, Generations and Random.
“She’s a writer who is writing so directly to an audience,” Lewis offers. “I think it has something to do with the way she’s been developed as a writer, because she was developed so carefully by the Royal Court and her work has been produced by them.
“She doesn’t have any fear that her work won’t be produced, so she doesn’t have anything tentative in her politics, in her ideas, or what she’s trying on stage. She doesn’t pull back from the experiment she’s running out of fear that it won’t be produced – so it’s actually incredibly brave writing.”
Stoning Mary features a highly talented cast including the extraordinary Yael Stone and Emma Jackson. Lewis herself is an intelligent and immensely passionate young director who enjoyed great success last year with 2000 Feet Away.
“If you’re not engaging, at least most of the time, as an artist, then you’re not earning your position,” she says. “I’m not a writer; I’m a finder of writing. I make theatre. So I feel like it’s my job to pick it up and pass it on to other people – to make sure that work like this actually gets on.”
Stoning Mary, SBW Stables Theatre (10 Nimrod Street, Kings Cross) until June 21. Bookings via MCA TIX on 1300 306 776 or online at griffintheatre.com.au.
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