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Griffin’s 2008 Stablemates season kicks off with Colder, a powerful new play that encapsulates the horror of not knowing. Playwright Lachlan Philpott sat down with Garrett Bithell.
What if someone you love vanished without a trace?
This is the disconcerting premise behind Lachlan Philpott’s Colder, which will make its world premiere at the SBW Stables Theatre tonight.
The play was inspired by the unexplained disappearance in 2005 of Simon Knight, a Sydney local and Lachlan’s close friend.
“He was also briefly my boyfriend as well,” Lachlan tells SX. “We were friends for a long time in Sydney and then we both ended up in Melbourne, living together for a year. So we became very intimately aware of each other’s lives.
“I then returned to Sydney and eventually went overseas. And while I was in Berlin I heard that Simon had gone missing, which came as a real shock – just this sense of complete disbelief – because you hear a lot about people going missing but you never think that one of your friends will go missing.
“Our friendship had always been very sporadic, and the last time I saw Simon it was quite clear that he was in a strange head space. I ran into him on King Street and he was just off the wall – I think he’d moved in a slightly different direction to me.
“But it’s so strange that he would go missing in a world where he was quite well known. He was a very handsome man, he was well-connected socially, and being visible is very much a part of our social currency.”
However, as Lachlan emphasises, Colder is not Simon’s story. It is a meditation on the infinite unknowns surrounding missing persons.
“Of course it was inspired by Simon’s disappearance but it’s more about the emotional response that people have to someone going missing,” he says. “It would have been a very difficult play to write had it been Simon’s story because at that time there was, and I guess there still is, a chance that he would come back.
“But also it’s too personal and close, and could expose a lot of things about Simon that his family perhaps wouldn’t want exposed – you’re treading a very awkward line there. So I had to separate Simon from the play.”
Indeed the fog of purgatory that engulfs those left behind is at the heart of Colder – how do you mourn someone’s loss when your only hope is their return?
“That sense of futility, unfinished business and having no answers,” Lachlan says. “Even our language doesn’t really cope with it – you try to figure out what tense to use.
People going missing doesn’t fit into this busy, tidy world that we try and keep. So the play is also a commentary on the kind of society we have that allows people to go missing – and that things just keep moving.”
Colder won the R E Ross Trust Award and was short-listed for the Griffin Award last year. Lachlan studied directing at the Victorian College of the Arts and completed the NIDA Playwrights Studio in 2003. While his plays have been acclaimed in Victoria, this is his first staging in Sydney.
“The work that has been the most successful of mine addresses issues in the gay community,” Lachlan says. Indeed his 2000 play Bison examined the effects of having casual sex, and Catapult later explored gay parenting.
“There were shows on during Mardi Gras that I found slightly insulting because they weren’t dealing with anything that’s particularly interesting. I think audiences will find this play a bit more experimental and challenging.”
Colder by Lachlan Philpott, SBW Stables Theatre (10 Nimrod Street, Kings Cross) until May 24. For tickets call MCA TIX on 1300 306 776 or visit griffintheatre.com.au.
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