Declan Greene’s play ‘8 Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography’ has received critical acclaim. The play focuses on two characters, a nurse in her forties who has brats for kids and is trapped in a loop of catastrophic debt, and a man who works in IT. He’s miserably married and trapped in his own loop of nightly porn-trawling. Both of them crave something else — but not necessarily each other.
The show, which is a co-production between the Griffin Theatre Company and the Perth Theatre Company, opens in Perth this week after a successful Sydney Season.
OUTinPerth spoke to playwright Declan Greene.
The title of this show is quite attention grabbing. When you’re writing does the title of fairly early to you?
For this work it definitely came at the end. It was really funny, I guess maybe because maybe in my own circle of friends or just maybe just in terms of my own understanding of culture of whatever, porn’s kind of not something that is kind of a major upset or anything like that or even anything that’s particularly shocking.
It really surprised me the amount of attention the title got. I only read the reviews a few weeks after the production opened. Nearly every review made some mention of the title. Which sort of surprised me because I guess the way I think about the way culture is kind of operating at the moment like porn isn’t really anything that’s even sub-cultural, it’s so close to the surface.
Is it that it’s there, but we don’t talk about it?
Maybe that’s it. It’s a weird thing this disjunction between the fact that on Channel V or whatever Miley Cyrus is swinging naked on a wrecking ball and we still think the word ‘pornography’ is controversial.
In terms of the way it arrived it was kind of supposed to be sort of like an irony because the play is like, in terms of the typical use of the word ‘pornography’, is like the furthest thing from pornography you can imagine.
The play is actually about two somewhat hateful middle aged people and their depressing lives. So there was something kind of appealing to me about, I guess irony, calling the play ‘Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography’ when actually what you’re watching is- maybe emotional pornography in terms of how far it goes into emotionally subject material but certainly not sexual pornography.
Your work has been described as subversive; do you aim to push peoples’ buttons?
I wouldn’t say that I aim to make the work deliberately subversive but I’m always kind of interested in asking questions of the audience that they’re not used to typically being asked.
I always want to investigate something, which I guess what most writers or artists of want to do. You want to try and ask the tough questions because otherwise you’re making something that’s benign and just kind of like faff. That’s always my intention. I always want to go out there and try and investigate something that is asking to be investigated but isn’t.
This production features music from Rachel Dease, she’s a Perth local. When you’re writing do you visualize it with music and all of those things?
Not so much. I’d never worked with Rachel before and it was amazing getting to work with her, she’s so brilliant and it’s a really hard play to score as well because it’s a really really simple. It’s like two actors standing onstage and just talking to the audience.
It’s really just like an act of storytelling, it’s really simple. So it doesn’t need much, but then at the same time so much of the play exists in that sonic world and exists aurally because words are everything in it. The way you support that is really delicate without overwhelming it and I think she’s done a really great job finding a way to kind of cushion the words without overwhelming them.
It’s interesting because that online world is something that’s really difficult to depict theatrically.
It’s kind of hard. At the moment because we spend so much of our time socially in online spaces, we literally spend our whole, half our lives in a space that doesn’t tangibly exist.
There’s a challenge for a lot of playwrights and filmmakers and a lot of novelists have had to take up in terms of how you really do represent that kind of non-reality or that kind of weird liminal and I think there’s enough tacky examples of doing live theatre with typing and projections coming up behind them. There’s definite pitfalls built in with the act of trying to represent that onstage.
We’ve tried to be very careful in how we bring that to stage. We really just did it in the simplest way possible. We tried to look at how basically a lot of the stuff we put out into online spaces or places like Skype and Facebook messenger or SMS or online dating websites like Tinder or whatever, it’s all actually is live text in a weird way.
They’re weird little mini-plays that people are authoring between them. Like in the weird way that if you’ve got your phone you can just get up and take a message so with someone you can have a script that sometimes goes back years, it charts the entire thing.
You have quite a record or poking fun at the established theatre scene. But now maybe you’re on the other side of the line. Are you ready for some younger theatre maker coming and poking fun at some of your work?
Yeah, definitely! I’ve been doing that for so long, I’ve been setting myself up for that. Personally, I don’t think I’m quite there yet.
I’m at that point where I’ve got one foot in both worlds. I still definitely haven’t stopped making work independently and at the moment in terms of the theatre company I run, Sisters Grimm, we’re kind of in an odd position at the moment where it seems we kind of get courted by mainstream theatre companies to do stuff that does sort of poke fun at them and their established conventions of bringing work onstage and their audiences. Which is kind of a weird thing, because it’s not very boundary pushing if they’re asking you to push boundaries.
Perth Theatre Company present ‘8 Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography’ starring Andrea Gibbs and Steve Rodgers at the Studio Underground at the State Theatre Centre from July 2 – 12. Tickets available at www.ticketek.com.au
Graeme Watson, image: Ben Boardman
