Luke Holmes
Will O’Mahony is the founder of acclaimed indie theatre company The Skeletal System, winner of the PAWA Best Script award (among others) and the writer of Tonsils + Tweezers. The debut production of T+T was in January 2016, and it’s current run under JackRabbit Theatre Company at the KXT is the first time Will has been performed in Sydney.
It’s also the first time he has had his work done by another company, and not been a part of the staging of it. “This is the first time I’ve handed over my play to someone else” Says Will. “It’s really been “Here’s the script, knock yourself out.” I think the creative team have been in contact once for clarification. So no news is good news, I guess.”
This clarity of script for Will comes out of a very organic writing process. When asked about how he constructs his plays, he responds: “I’ve been told there are two types of writers: gardeners and architects, and I’m definitely a gardener. I guess that means I write from a place of intuition and play and I don’t really know where it’s going or what it means until its finished. Once I’ve finished a draft I’ll have a better idea of what it was my unconscious was trying to unpack. My process changes slightly every time but Tonsils + Tweezers was definitely a script that evolved.”
This natural evolving of the script as it’s being written is also held together by having a clear and powerful starting point. “I usually start with a “What if” question and they are usually simple. What if you fell in love with the person who publicly shamed you?; What if a shark negotiated with its victim?; What if you wanted to go to Mars and never come back?” And the core of this play in particular? “It’s a play about friendship. What it means to find a friend, have a friend, own a friend and lose a friend. The characters find themselves in a world addicted to ‘friendly’ – which might be further from true friendship than we like to think.”
There is a similarly human approach in his attitude to the process of making theatre itself. “Creating new work requires incredible energy and patience” he observes, “Energy to bring a draft into the world and patience to refine that raw material over a number of years. That’s been my experience. All new writing puts makers and audiences in a position of great vulnerability.”
This vulnerability and the uncertainty that comes with making and performing new works can be difficult, but this freshness also gives it the potential for being some of the best work that theatre (or any art) can offer, since “No-one knows what to expect, we arrive at the theatre much closer to a clean slate and in this space I think we can, as Anne Bogart puts it, ‘Think things through together’.”
Thinking collectively, towards a common goal or in a common interest, is one of the things goof art has always excelled at promoting, and this is part of the value of the medium for Will. As he says when asked about role of the writer and artist in our world, “I think the theatre should have higher ambitions than simply entertainment. When I think of entertainment I think of things that speed us up and I think the theatre is at its best when over the course of the event we slow down, lose sense of time, are brought to a pause – as individuals and as a community. It is in a place of shared stillness that reflections big and small can take place. And after reflection, possibly action. I do like the idea that art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed and it is this that I think separates it from just ‘entertainment’.”
Tonsils and Tweezers runs from 12th to 27th Jan at the Kings Cross Theatre
