The best thing I've ever written?

Or just a mess?

In 2019, I had a bonkers idea. It came in a dream or some half-imagined wild thought. 

This: homes spontaneously combusting and killing the families inside them. And a Royal Commission into the companies that made the homes. And an unbelievable revelation that the homes collapsing are linked, somehow, to a new contagious illness. We learn clinical depression has somehow mutated and is now affecting the material world. It is killing men and destroying families. 

There’s also a tarot card reader somewhere, and the figures of the Major Arcana are walking the earth, much like Demi-Gods. They see the mutation as a grand opening in human consciousness and an opportunity to evolve. They are on the hunt for a prophet.

That was the idea. Some ideas are sleepy, pleasing things. Others are red hot and urgent. This was red hot. I was excited by this. It pleased my ego. I thought of it as some great Australian Fantasy. Perhaps a Great Work I could write in my middle age. Big in themes and ideas. 

I think I first pitched it to Sam Strong when he was AD of Queensland Theatre. We were talking about other works I could write. I dropped this idea, and I got as far as Royal Commission, and I could see I had lost him. Bless him, he feigned interest, but I could tell he was faking. No bite.

Then COVID-19 happened. And I had time. So I applied for funding and got it, and I developed it at La Boite and wrote the damn thing.

It was a wild, woolly play that went all over the place. But it was funny and sad, and I thought it was quite good. When I read it with actors I respected, it resonated. La Boite ended up supporting it a little bit, and there was a reading. I’m not sure if the drafts got consecutively better or just more confused. But nevertheless, it was there, and I thought it had a future.

I submitted it to every playwriting prize in the country over about eighteen months. It never got anywhere, which is fair enough. I got accepted into a screenwriting adaptation program for it. I spent a week with a TV Producer who stopped me mid-sentence of my first pitch. 

‘Don’t lead with Royal Commissions. Royal Commissions are boring. I don’t care, and we don’t care about Royal Commissions.’

He was probably right. Over the next five days, I stuffed the wild beast into a tight one-season outline. The plot was more linear, the spirit less free, but the heart was still there. Three production companies said, ‘Thanks but no thanks.’

I’d lost heart by that stage anyway. 

I’d planned to excavate it into a novel. In a novel, you can wander. You can also make it as expensive as you please. But the energy required feels like a long time away. Perhaps one day.

This isn’t a self-pity post. This is only to say that some works exist independent of any big ‘outcome’. They’re just there and need to be written, I suppose. And the play still sits in my heart and makes me smile. And I include it here, in total, for paid subscribers, as another little outing for it.

The play I didn’t have much faith in - a one-man show about parenthood- was shortlisted for the QPDA. Major Arcana didn’t make it past the first round when I submitted it the previous year.

Go figure. 

You can find the full play below if you’re a paid subscriber. I release a full play once every three months. You can find a play about social media for classroom use here, and the adaptation of my award-winning memoir here.