Award-winning playwright Stephen House slummed it on the streets of Paris to pen his confronting tale of a man living on the very edge. The final result was Appalling Behaviour, a play about a ‘shocking, dark and dangerous’ underworld of the French capital. From his Adelaide home, the gay SA-born author spoke with OUTinPerth about homelessness and hustlers.
Appalling Behaviour was written while you were living on the streets of Paris, what was that like?
I think it is why the play rings so true. I had been working in Ireland a couple of years ago and was on my way back [to Australia]. I had always wanted to go to Paris and had never been there and I was in the space for writing a new play… I had been really interested in writing about the kind of urban underworld, the homeless franchise… I fell into the underworld of Paris and the world of the homeless and almost spent a month on the street while I wrote the play… I pretty much wrote the entire play on a notebook in my back pocket.
What sort of characters did you meet while on the street?
One of the interesting things in the piece is the other people. This is a work about 48 hours in the life of an Australian man living on the streets of Paris. He’s in a really fragile place mentally and he’s battling his inner demons of drug and alcohol addiction. He’s falling into a chaotic crowd who are in some ways his peers. He kind of falls in love with a prostitute called Caroline and a hustler, a man called Romano. He has a really intense experience with Romano… The character that I’m playing falls into a totally unrealistic, emotional, romantic, sexual void with Romano. None of the characters that I have in the play are real. But everything I always write is based upon reality. So what I do is take a real situation and then creatively twist it into a piece of work. In many ways, Appalling Behaviour does sum up my experience of falling into the street life of Paris.
Why did you choose Paris?
Paris is always summed up as one of the most glamorous, romantic and beautiful cities in the world. In fact, I found it to be an incredibly good metaphor for ‘nothing is as it seems’. By falling into the edgy world in this incredibly romantic city I felt that the parallels there were an interesting point to explore. Also, this guy gets ripped off in love and Paris is meant to be the city of love. So I found it such an interesting place to play with all the notions in the play. It’s a bit like ‘what’s behind this glamorous façade’ and so by setting it in the city of Paris and yet crawling into these grimy corners, I just found it to be a really interesting parallel. I had thought about these parallels before and I thought about it for a couple of years before I took pen to paper, I was going to set it in Sydney and then in Dublin. The more and more I explored the notion of Paris, the more appealing I found the idea. There was also something about writing it in a non-English speaking city.
So do you speak French?
No I don’t. I don’t speak any French at all and I spent a month there writing and hanging out with really edgy people. It just helped to intensify the situation.
We know that the character is bisexual but what else do we find out about him?
We find out this guy is in a very chaotic mental episode. He’s also coming down from a major bender and the fragile, chaotic situation that he is in, is very much influenced in being homeless. We do find out he has been travelling around with a bag, so he’s not your classic homeless person… he’s a wanderer of the world. In a way, the main character represents total freedom to just be and to just do.
Homelessness is the central theme but what are you trying to say about it in Appalling Behaviour?
The play caused a lot of controversy before it opened… People questioned it until they saw the play and when they saw the play, they said, ‘Wow, I know why you’re doing it’. It tells an untold story. Actually, what the play does is it opens the door on a world that we walk by but don’t understand. I suppose what I wanted to explore…is that there are human beings behind the person hunched up with a bed in the park. There’s a human story about the guy drinking a bottle of port and sleeping under a bridge. That was my reason for making this work because it shows all the people who are suffering on the street yet we all ignore them, me included. If there is someone screaming madly with a bottle of port and wearing filthy clothes, we walk around them. We don’t really contemplate on the fact that person is a real person with a real story.
Appalling Behaviour will premiere on March 22 and runs till April 9 as part of the Blue Room Theatre’s Up Close season. Bookings and information available at www.blueroom.org.au
Benn Dorrington
