Australian gay playwright Damien Millar is in Perth with his award-winning play, The Modern International Dead. From East Timor to Iraq, Millar’s play explores the stories of three dedicated people putting their lives on the line to help their fellow man. OUTinPerth spoke to Millar about some of these tales.

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The stories in The Modern International Dead are real stories. What was the interview process like?
Massive! I did about six months of interviews. A lot of that time spent interviewing people in quite strange circumstances from brothels to hospitals to being out in practice in live mine fields. A lot of time with intelligence people, meeting them in secret and bunches of SAS soldiers. So then I had to transcribe all that stuff. Oh my god, transcribing is a horror. Only then to remember that it is a play and I don’t want to just serve up slabs of wordy-sounding monologues. Then started to turn it into drama and theatre and chuck in lots of questionable gags.

What inspired The Modern International Dead?
… We often don’t think this of ourselves in this way but we as Australians can tell a big international story using witnesses and not feel so curled up in our little corner of the world. So I was driven by a set of cracking stories I had heard like the story of Rod Barton, the weapons detective who was one of the major figures in Iraq who then headed up the UN mission ‘Restore Hope’ in Somalia and became the adviser to Hans Blick, all in that incredible time and wrote up the intelligence that was then dismissed by Howard (former PM) about the weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). So it was an incredibly brave story of this guy who had to ditch his former career as one of the world’s top intelligence operatives and did it all so he could whistle blow over the actions that then came about over prisoner abuse…

How was the opening night?
It’s always exciting just to see a play to be born there, live on stage for a preview audience. That’s a thrill to me. There are a lot of playwrights who wander around the world, boasting ‘the play was born with me’ but it’s always born with the company that produces it, they’re right there at the coalface of the preview audience… It’s a completely new production [in Perth] which is a miraculously rare thing in this country…

Australia’s role in Afghanistan and Iraq is still a touchy subject. How do people react to the play in regards to our current deployments?
I remember some relief that was expressed by a few people who didn’t understand the story of the Weapons of Mass Destruction and this play tells the story without ideology. It goes into why people thought Saddam Hussein was making WMD, he was telling people he was. There were massive amounts of ingredients for particular types of chemical and biological weapons that had just strangely gone missing. And then, on the other side of that story are Australians like Barton who is there saying “if there are any of these WMDs, they’re probably out-of-date, they’re tiny… This whole going to war thing is probably a trap for Iraq”. The story of the WMDs is actually a heart-breaking one.

Does your play then represent the story not shown in the media?
The thing that drama can do is marry facts with experience. With that weird thing, empathy, what I think is always interesting is the world is stranger and more complicated than what we read in the newspapers and drama gives life to that complication. The coverage around Iraq and how it is ditching the Australian intelligence and using that shaky US intelligence as an excuse for going to war, is this the end of the days beyond ideology? It’s just heartbreaking.

Benn Dorrington

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