Prize winning playwright Patricia Cornelius

Surely, a play is meant to be performed, spoken, physicalised, watched, experienced, or all of the above; but not read? It’s an argument that seems to come up every year when literary prizes are being decided; with the novel usually coming out on top. Can a play really be argued to hold the same literary qualities as a novel?

‘I think that’s absolute bullshit,’ says Patricia Cornelius with what appears to be her typical candor and bright energy. ‘I read plays all the time. I’ve read them since I was a young girl and I imagined them, all the time.’ Would people deny the literary qualities of Shakespeare, or Ibsen, or Chekhov? The problem is that we’re not used to reading plays anymore. Some people are quite put off by the idea. ‘In fact, it’s kind of like a lost art,’ says Cornelius, but it’s delightful to read plays.

This week Patricia Cornelius took out the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Drama worth $25,000 for her play Do Not Go Gentle, which premiered last year at fortyfive downstairs in Melbourne. She adds the prize to the shelf along with the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards - Play Award ($30,000) that she won earlier this year for the same play. It also scored the R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights' Script Development Award in 2006 and the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award in 2007. She’ll have to wait a little longer to see if she can score a State Premier trifecta with the West Australian Premier’s Book Award for Scripts ($10,000).

Like the Dylan Thomas poem from which it gets it’s name the characters in Do Not Go Gentle are raging against their own dying of the light. More than a story about six people in a nursing home contemplating what’s happened to their lives, Cornelius has juxtaposed their stories with Robert Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition, interweaving the residents failing memories and distorted sense of reality with actual diary entries from Scott’s journey. The characters in Do Not Go Gentle face the inevitability of death not with fear but with courage, humour and defiance.

The most frightening thing the play deals with says Cornelius is the sense that we will reach a certain age, and look back and think, ‘I have not fulfilled one, single, dream,' that we'll be left somehow feeling we’ve been cheated of life. ‘We all fear that, that all the things we wanted to do, or places we wanted to go, or things that we had ideas about have finally... passed you by.’ There’s something terrifying about that but also riveting, she thinks.

It’s certainly not easy subject matter. But Cornelius isn’t about to pander to notions of making things easy. ‘Often people say to me, ‘You write about really dire things’, or ‘They’re so bleak’, and I think, ‘My God, if I was the first to write about bleak things’. As if one should avoid bleakness; as if bleakness equals boring!’ She’d rather be bleak, and move or terrify an audience than make everyone feel good, comfortable that all they need to discuss afterwards is where the nearest coffee shop is.

‘It’s awful isn’t it...to go to a play and you come out and you talk with somebody and neither of you mention it… It just didn’t seem to merit mentioning.’ Even hating it would be better, she says, somewhat exasperated, rather this kind of ‘that was fine’… ‘that was funny’…’lovely costumes’..

It would be nice to think that awards and recognition such as the various Premier’s Awards around the country would raise public awareness and interest in Australian plays but it doesn’t seem to be the case.

More and more we’re less about art and more about entertainment, bemoans Cornelius, noting the trend to put ‘TV celebrities’ in to theatrical plays for the ‘star-power’ hook, whether they’re suited or experienced seems neither here nor there. That’s just one aspect we’re seeing as pressure to keep the houses full with crowd-pleasers squeezes out new works, controversial works and particularly Australian plays. ‘It’s such a pity because theatre can become so boring,’ says Cornelius. ‘You pay a lot of money and sit there bored out of your brains – it’s terrible.’

It’s even worse for Australia’s female playwrights. Cornelius says the statistic is devastating, something like 11% of plays produced are by Australian female playwrights. ‘And you sort of go, Wh- why? Cause I can name more than 10 easily, 20, female playwrights in this country that I think are really great writers.’

We still seem to have the idea that the cultural meccas are in New York or London, and are turning our back on home-grown stories says Cornelius. ‘There is a breadth of work out there that is totally ignored and it’s unbelievable frustrating.’ Nobody would look at Do Not Go Gentle, she says, not until fortyfive downstairs put it on last year. ‘They’re such a champion of it and Julian Meyrick [who directed it] and really I’m so grateful to them ‘cause it’s such an effort to get anybody to want to do it – and you know, I kinda go, ‘How come? How come?’

Do Not Go Gentle will be published later this year by Currency Press.