Five questions for... Jane Bodie
June 2010
Jane Bodie is a playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. She is the current head of the postgraduate playwriting course at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) in Sydney. Her plays include A Single Act, RIDE and Still and have been performed worldwide from Australia to New York and Brazil. A Single Act premiered at the Hampstead Theatre in London and had its Australian premiere at Melbourne Theatre Company in 2006, and won the Victorian Premier's Award for Best Play. Jane has also written extensively for television and radio, including the series The Secret Life of Us and Crash/Burn.
In 2010 Jane joins PlayWriting Australia to workshop her new play Here at the National Script Workshop 2010.
Your play’s called HERE. What’s it about?
It’s about waiting – about what being forced to wait for life-changing news does to people, and what it does to how you view every moment of your life, up until that moment.
How long have you been working on Here, and what’s the process been?
A few years ago I was on attachment at the National Theatre in London and another play of mine, A Single Act, was in rehearsal and I began writing HERE, I think as a response to the ideas and themes thrown up by the other play and watching the rehearsal process. A Single Act has quite a complicated mathematical structure and I really wanted HERE’s structure to be informed by the emotions conveyed in the play, driven by that, so that the sound of the play, its music, evoked the overall mood and shape of the piece.
You’re the head of the new postgraduate playwriting course at NIDA. How easy is it to find a balance between being a writer and a teacher of playwriting?
Not easy! The job (and course) is still very new and though NIDA (and I) know how necessary a course like this to the future of Australian playwriting and we’re excited about it, it’s also a big job – and it feels like a huge responsibility sometimes and that can and will keep me away from my own writing, for a while I think in order to do it well and with conviction, at least at the start of the job. Thankfully, the fact that at the moment I’m not getting to work on my own work much, is compensated by the fact I’m working with six new exciting playwrights and new voices – and the daily conversations we have about their work, new writing and plays keeps me very inspired and fired up about the kind of work I think should be being made and my own future work.
What are the top three things that you teach your students that all playwrights should know?
Choose to write the play of the story that you really want to tell.
Know the sound of your own music, because in that lies the structure of your play – which will in turn articulate the overall emotion you want to evoke with the work.
Isolate the spine of the work that you feel the play can’t do without and stand by it.
How did you get into playwriting?
I wrote my first play when I was seven and from then on I read plays more than books – I think I always found reading dialogue more compelling and certainly more comforting than any other form of literature – there was a sense of life to it, that I immediately understood and got. So as soon as I was old enough I was organising my whole street into casting sessions to perform my latest dramatic work – which was slightly embarrassing for my parents.
It naturally followed that after that and when I’d grown up (a bit) I should start a theatre company, which I did in Melbourne in 1997, with a host of brilliant artists – and so we got to do the work and learn how to make it better and that was when I really started to isolate and clarify the kind of work I wanted to see and make.
