From the Director

Michael Gow and I grew up on either side of the same town. He in Como, me in Concord. We both started infants school in 1960 and did the HSC in ‘72 at Jannali and Homebush Boys’ High School respectively. At school we were both called the same names that are given to the gentler boys by the footy heroes in the playground, we both experienced the premature death to leukaemia of someone close to us – for Michael his best friend David, for me my brother Ian. At Sydney Uni we fell into the fabulous refuge of SUDS (Sydney University Drama Society) and, having serious fun doing plays, our professional development began. We acted together occasionally (he was much better) and I directed Michael in our last SUDS show in 1979. In that same year we began parallel professional careers. In 1986 I directed Michael’s great play Away at Melbourne’s Playbox, in 1988 he wrote the screenplay for Edens Lost that I directed, and we worked together on a mini-series from Patrick White’s The Tree of Man that has never been produced. In 1991 a mutual friend was living in my house in Leichhardt when her boyfriend’s boss’s dog Phoebe, that they had been minding while the boss was overseas, went missing. Thus began a chain of events that informed Michael’s play Sweet Phoebe and most recently, Toy Symphony.

I suppose I list all of the above information as a way of saying that I feel very (at times uncomfortably) close to the world of this play, and, I guess, singularly qualified to direct it! Ultimately, of course, this is all privileged information and the test of the play will be how it stands on its own terms.

In a Sunday Arts interview with Virginia Trioli last week, the great comic Magda Szubanski offered the comment that we in Australia fight our suburban past but are also defined by it and that any artist at some point has to work from it because it has made us who we are. And I realised that Michael has written a profoundly personal and honest work about the collapse of the suburban dream. A work about both the power and the bastardry of the artist. What’s fascinating is the way the play apparently changes shape, morphing two or three times along the way into what can seem to be another kind of play altogether. I love that. And that the whole play works through action which is analogous to the central experience of the blockage and flow of creativity.

It’s two weeks before our first audience and we’re still finding the direction, the humour, the pain of the work. It’s exciting and difficult fun. It comes straight from the heart.

Neil Armfield