Music is at once the most abstract and the most appropriated of art forms. It’s a language that can exist without words; an idea or image conveyed through the medium of sound and transmuted through emotional experience. It’s high art and low culture, Bartok and Hilary Duff, Boys2Men and Beethoven. It’s the sublime given voice, it’s a cry in the dark, it’s slutty and sleazy and brimming with life. In The Off Week

And for some individuals - in a recent and heated debate over a stage show that’s just closed in Melbourne — it’s a language that does not belong in a theatre precisely because of this intemperate status — it can be abused, manipulated, cheapened by dint of its inherently viscous nature. Especially if it’s the idiom of popular music.

The show to which I’m referring, Sleeping Beauty was co-created by Michael Kantor, Anna Tregloan, Paul Jackson and myself for Malthouse Theatre. We took the classic fairy tale and rendered it as a contemporary story about a contemporary girl. A sixteen-year-old girl wanting to grab life with both hands.

Instead of using spoken word, we told this story almost entirely through well-known tunes of the last four or so decades—best known as performed by Elvis Costello, Nick Cave/The Birthday Party, The Divinyls, The Saints, The Runaways, The La’s, David Bowie, John Lennon, Britney Spears, Carly Simon, Supertramp, Mahalia Jackson, Madness, Eminem and so on - performed live by the four performers (Alison Bell, Ian Stenlake, Grant Smith and Renée Geyer) together with a four-piece band.

Sleeping Beauty enjoyed a very successful season and created quite a stir. The biggest talking point has been our use of such music, with opinions sharply divided on this although most audiences were positive.

What our critics have found hardest to deal with is using popular music as the narrative of a theatrical work and how this might accurately reflect the journey of a young girl from childhood to adult life. Underlying both issues is that hoary old question “but is it theatre?”

So, the nay-sayers say, Sleeping Beauty was nothing more than a tarted-up Year 12 Eisteddfod, we’re just a bunch of theatre artists who don’t even know what’s contemporary for teenagers, and most interestingly that the work failed to engage with the real-life experience of real-life young women.

What is it about using music, popular music, that has created such fierce commentary? Or, more positively, why did we make this artistic choice?

Our starting point in making Sleeping Beauty was that songs like ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’ and “Oops … I Did it Again!” are the fairy tales of our times — popular music has replaced the classic Grimm Brothers narrative with its own condensed cultural coding of the individual. We wanted in short to work with the very strictures of this genre — the melody that lodges in the brain, the chorus that lifts the heart beat, the thrilling guitar solo with the hint of frisson — and the often banal or at best simple lyrics that only leap into life when sung. It is precisely this combination of elements that serves in so many ways (love ‘em or hate ‘em) as the notation of our own lives.

We also wanted to highlight the ‘entertainment’ quality of music — the way in which the complexities and the contradictions of the everyday get swallowed up in an ‘easy listening’ experience (Britney Spears was a strong reference here, as well Charles Aznavour and Axiom) or, in the better songs (e.g., Cave and Costello), a seductive summary of something that can’t be summarised.

Putting music in the theatre was also about us drawing attention to the theatre itself as a place of entertainment — a site of mystery and imagination and yet with its own desire to please, cajole and entice. Its own ability, in other words, to play “let’s pretend”. We, as theatre artists, offer this pretence to the audience and, all going well, there’s an act of mutual engagement aimed at getting to the truth of something else altogether. It’s up to the audience to work this out.

Our critics seemed to feel that everything hinged on the music but in fact the show was far more than this precisely because it sat within a theatre space. Not only the lights, the sound, the costumes but all the conventions of theatre were present and writ large. For example, we used overtly fake props, including a saw and an extremely large sword that was (surprise surprise) unsheathed by Prince Charming, as well as Broadway choreography, to accentuate that we were constructing an artificial world in order to talk about something that we can never represent: our own singular experience of being a girl or a boy.

That’s Entertainment, a song by The Jam, was a refrain running through the show and there were other references through other means, such as lighting states, to the world of entertainment, but I suspect we never made this idea clear enough and hence our critics fixated on whether we were bastardising lyrics and destroying the ‘real’ meaning of the songs. In actual fact we were more interested in the emotional truths of our performers as they sung, and how these intersected with the truths of the songs as a collective experience.

Which meant we had to choose songs with which a broad-ranging audience would have a relationship.

Just as a pumpkin coach or a golden crown serve as shorthand for something else because we all, more or less, know what these symbols mean, our musical choices needed to be of sufficient age that they’d become part of popular culture. So we couldn’t chose the most up-to-date tunes because we’d been second-guessing which ones would live in on in summaries of a time and place. It’s like those songs we all hear in our heads when we picture the Swinging Sixties, the Glam Seventies or the Material Eighties. The Beatles, Bowie, Madonna — it doesn’t mean no one else was around, playing a guitar.

It was simply that we needed songs that enough people, of enough ages, knew, to the point where they would stir up personal and shared memories. A common language.

And it seems to us, irrespective of any bias of our own (impossible to escape), that it’s songs of approximately 20 or so years ago that have this sort of currency. Of course earlier and later tunes can too, but we were aiming for that song list that we all hear in supermarkets, laundromats, on the radio and in bars, pubs and other people’s houses.

Of course we wanted to chose the songs that resonated with us personally. If they didn’t, we would’ve been fraudulent in some funny way. How could we explore the push-pull of popular music if we didn’t feel it? We suspect that this is another reason why audiences were generally so enthusiastic about the show - they got our love for music even if they didn’t unpack all our reasons for choosing this or that.

As we made our selections, we saw - as some commentators have remarked - that the male voice (singer and songwriter) was dominant in our choices. Some spoke as if we didn’t know this. Instead it linked, in all sorts of ways, with our preoccupation with “entertainment” and to the central question of the piece: how do I grow up?

The adolescent Sleeping Beauty, in our version of the story, is guided by versions of herself that are delineated by the songs of others, the songs of men. Contra the critics, however, she’s no blank slate.

Just as a culture takes on other influences and moulds them into its own, she tries on first this and then that idea of female identity, attempting to find out who she is as she works it out. There’s a musical parallel here too. Indigenous Australia has embraced Country and Western, and we all know the origins of white rock and roll but always these sources are reconfigured by those who appropriate them. Our Sleeping Beauty knows these songs, the same songs our critics know, but she receives them from where she’s at, for better and worse, and does the same to them.

She wanders through a dreamscape of her own making, and she inhabits but must discard all these versions of herself as she goes on. Instead, she faces life as a journey, navigated by choice and circumstance and culture, with no clear destination.

Popular music tracks the pathways she could take but knows, as theatre does, its own limitations in terms of embodying the rich confusion of the journey. It satisfies us because it pins us down and we in turn take it up and spin it around. Like a record; like a tune in our heads.

Sleeping Beauty is awake and she’s playing the music up loud!