I came into the theatre as an actor.  I soon realised that I was sadly mistaken in my choice of profession.  The poetry of my perception was matched only by my failure of its expression.

I admitted my mistake and moved on.

Directing was my next mistake.

Of that brief period of my life I can only say that given my understanding that success teaches you nothing I felt my education almost complete.

I wondered . . . where did my next failure lie?  For I was, I confess without shame, a willing student.  So I turned with uncertain confidence, to writing.

And within its embrace I remain, confidently uncertain.

I have been invited to talk about what I want to express through my work in the theatre and what do I want to achieve.  I've also been asked to speak about what value I place on intercultural theatrical exchanges.  I'll try to do all of those things, but I want to begin very simply.

It's possible to create theatre without any money at all, at any time of the day or night, in any place you chose to create it.  All that you need is an actor and an audience.  An audience of one will suffice. 

Let's imagine that kind of situation.  Two people; one an actor, the other his or her  audience.  One person speaks and the other listens (for let's imagine that it's the kind of theatre with words: there are other kinds, of course, but I am a writer, so I ask to be allowed my own particular prejudice).  The one who speaks also moves: he or she makes gestures, moves this way or that . . . then stands completely motionless.  The one listening is also watching.

Why is only one person speaking and moving?  Why is the other listening and watching?  What is the nature of this peculiar encounter?  What is its purpose?

I want to begin here, with this very basic question, for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that this kind of encounter can happen in all cultures and has been happening for centuries. 

I have never been very interested in focusing on the differences between cultures, as this assumes that one can define one's own to begin with: that a kind of vantage point can be created, from which one can observe those 'others' who are not like you.  This inevitably leads to the creation of comparisons.  But once they are created, those comparisons are, by their very nature, one-sided.  Who is making the comparison?  Who is the subject (or perhaps the victim) of this comparison? 

Of course differences between cultures exist; they are inevitable, and they are vitally important.  Self definition is an instinct, for cultures as much as for individuals; the expression of difference is the manifestation of identity.  Strangely enough, or perhaps it isn't so strange, identity is the first step towards solitude, which may perhaps be the natural state towards which all human beings aspire. 

To return to the actor and his or her audience.  This simple act of theatre, for that's what it is, is simply one person communicating with another; it's a particular kind of communication and it probably involves telling a story.  But it is more than narration: it is an enactment of a story; more vivid than a mere telling and dependent on the presence of the audience.  Without the presence of the audience this act of theatre could not exist.  I like very much that equation: I like the interdependence of theatre, because it seems a very basic, human thing to me.  I also know that theatre's possibilities reside in the hearts of those who witness it.  The theatre is made real in one moment only, in the moment of seeing and hearing.  Then it is no more.  That to me also seems very human; more than that, it is an essential expression of our mortality.  The theatre concerns itself with life and is itself an expression of life. 

If the life that occurs on stage - however grotesque or comic or tragic - strikes its audience as truthful, as whole, as containing meaning, that is the only proof needed that we are not naive in believing the possibilities of our art. 

In a world that constantly attempts to commodify and homogenise the creations of mankind, the theatre is a place that might still allow an eccentric vision; by eccentric I mean singular.  But it is a singular vision shared by many, by all who make the act of theatre possible.  It is, if you like, a collective dreaming.  It is a waking dream, that exists for an hour or two in time, in a particular place, on a particular night.  It cannot be commodified.  You cannot own it.  You can only experience it, and then remember it.

In other words: the theatre can be a kind of rebellion.  In defence of what?  In the hope of what?

In defence of the moment as experienced.  In the hope of memory that cannot be erased.  And in celebration of the exquisite fragility and power of remembering; because some things happen only once.

We cannot possess a moment of theatre.  Yet it can remain with us.  How do we hold on to what we cannot possess? 

We must grasp the moment as it is being created, not once it has finished. 

We turn our eyes upon the stage.  Something is about to happen.  It will happen in time.  The time within which it happens is both real and imagined. 

The language we will hear spoken is both the language we know and its transformation into pure action (and this transformation occurs right in front of us, as it has occurred for more than two thousand years). 

The characters whose actions we witness, whose voices we hear, are both human beings like ourselves and the metaphors of our selves, the celebrants and mourners of our state, the savage or saintly expressions of feeling unchanged by history, circumstance or place.

Agamemnon will enter his palace.  Tartuffe will hide beneath the table.  Lear will curse his daughters one by one.  Willy Loman will betray his wife and lose his sons.  Roberto Zucco will throw himself from the prison roof.

And then we shall all go home, empty handed.

We will remember what we have witnessed, knowing we will never live through the same moments again.  It is an experience of life itself. 

We enter the theatre because we are free to, free to allow ourselves those moments of incandescence; those moments of sheer mortality.

To be more specific about my own work:

Generally, I feel that once I have finished writing a play my responsibilities towards that play have ended; it is then time to put the work into other hands, so that they may make of it what they will.  If I have written the play well, there will be certain things about it that cannot be ignored, but it will also be open to interpretation.  Again, if I have written the play well, these interpretations should reveal rather than obscure the intentions and meanings of the play, which may be multiple.  I may then be able to rediscover my work when it appears on stage, embodied in the presence of the actors.  Such is my hope.

I have been asked to say a few things about my work.  I'd like to talk about my plays To Whom It May Concern and Scissors, Paper, Rock.  In taking up this invitation, I do so partly to investigate my own intentions and to re-examine what I feel are my responsibilities towards my work. 

My work has often been called cinematic, mainly because I frequently use short scenes and shifting locations.  In To Whom It May Concern and Scissors, Paper, Rock this technique owes much more to plays such as Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Ödön Von Horváth's Kasimir and Karoline, Xavier Kroetz's Farmyard and David Mamet's Edmond (to name a few) than to any supposed cinematic influence.  To my mind, cinema is a composition of images out of which language emerges; theatre is a body of language out of which images may flower.

In the theatre, the use of short scenes and shifting locations presupposes, perhaps even insists, on a scenic design that is not encumbered with naturalistic detail; above all, it insists on flexibility.  This necessary flexibility is a means of escaping the limitations of the quotidian and approaching the freedom of the metaphoric.

The theatre of Shakespeare works in the same way: a few square metres of stage can be a battlefield, the next it can be a bedchamber or a forest.  The 'reality' of what is being presented to the audience resides in the language of the characters and the evolution of the narrative, which is itself a product of language and not of image.

What response actors may have to this situation, which places enormous emphasis on the actor's performance, is more difficult to determine.  As well as wanting to rid my plays of unnecessary naturalism as far as their physical presentation is concerned, I try not to use stage directions that prescribe emotions.  For me, to do so would be to suggest that I want to reproduce a perceived reality, a 'correct' emotional response.  But apart from the presence of the actors, the language the actors speak is the only reality on stage, from which everything else must emerge.  I want, above all, for the actors to engage with the language of the plays; for their emotional and intellectual responses to that language to brought to bear on the creation of their characters.  A simple enough idea, but I think that in this way it's possible to approach the truthfulness of what is uttered on stage and the truthfulness of the moment in which it is uttered.  That is where the power of theatre ultimately lies: not in what it reproduces or imitates, but in what it can be in the actual moment of its creation, which is what the audience has come to witness. 

(I should also add here, that any play I write may have meanings and intentions beyond those I imagined when I was writing it.  If there is a certain complicity between myself and the director, the designer and actors who have chosen to present a play I have written, it is a complicity that assumes that I am not necessarily the best person to judge the worth of the play or how best it might be interpreted and presented; the production of the play should take it one step further than I was able to in writing it). 

Language is the single most important aspect of the plays I write: it's from the language uttered on stage that everything else emerges.  I'd like to concentrate on To Whom It May Concern for a moment, because it is a play where language and its absence is crucial.

The play concerns an old man and his son.  The man is in his sixties, the son about forty.  The son is profoundly disabled: he can speak only one word: 'Papa'.  At the opening of the play the man has discovered that he has cancer and will soon die.  He has to tell his son the news.  The man also has to decide what will happen to his son once he has passed away. 

The words spoken by the characters in To Whom It May Concernemerge from a profound silence.  The words we hear them speak are the only words they speak; there is no unheard conversation between them.  We hear everything they say.  The rest is silence.

This silence is an terribly important aspect of the play, and it is connected to the apparent 'shortness' of some of the scenes.  When the father and his son are waiting in the bank manager's office the father only speaks a few lines.  But how long are they waiting before the father speaks?  How long do they wait after he speaks?  What's important to understand is that their relationship is essentially a silent one.  The son cannot speak to his father and, generally speaking, the father has no need to speak to his son.  What could he have to tell him?  What could he ask him?  How long could he bear to speak to someone who cannot respond to him?  Their life together is essentially a physical one; it is each other's presence, their physical proximity to one another, that identifies and defines their relationship.  The silence within which they live is something that insulates and isolates them.  Within this silence they are able to manage their difficulties; in other words, they have learnt how to endure. 

It is only because of the situation in which the father finds himself that he needs to speak.  Something important, something terrible is happening and his son must be told what it is and what it means; his son's silent, insulated, protected existence is about to change irrevocably.  When the father arrives home from hospital in the opening scene of the play, he brings the outside world home with him; nothing in his son's life or his own will ever be the same again.

It is the pressure of the situation that forces the father to speak, not only to his son, but to others as well.  He is a man attempting to emerge from years of isolation to confront the realities of an unfamiliar world.  He must deal with doctors, bank managers, his estranged family, his poverty, his growing fear for himself and for his son.  He must find a way to create a future for his son while at the same time preparing for his own death.  What he discovers is that he is alone and that, for him, it seems there is no help to be found.

It is only when he is on the brink of despair and resignation, when he must admit his failure to provide a future for his son or to prepare for his death, that the father honestly faces the fact that he cannot escape: that his son is utterly dependent on him.  In that final admission he also realises that his dependence on his son is just as great.  He turns to him for the only consolation he can find; the silent comfort of touch, which is where the love between the father and his son is most deeply felt.  It is that final gesture towards which I was working when I was writing the play; it was the gesture that I wanted the play to finally 'achieve'.

At the close of the play there are two central questions left unanswered: what will the father do now and what will become of his son?  The play's resolution is not a practical but an emotional one: the father and his son love one another.  This fact will not solve their dilemma; their situation remains the same as it was at the opening of the play.  But something has been revealed.  The father and his son's mutual dependence is not a burden, a weakness nor a prison; it is the fragile manifestation of their humanity in the face of silence and death.

But this is only what I think about the play. 

I believe that the text of a play must exist without qualification, without either the explanations or the interpretations of its author; it must stand alone, witnessed by an audience without that audience being told how they must witness it.  In other words, the performance of a play must be an occasion of genuine experience. 

My only genuine experience of a play is its original creation, which is a deeply personal act, even if it is undertaken in the knowledge that ultimately that act will be made public.  A contradiction?  Yes, but it is one that I feel I need to embrace.  To write anything at all often feels like a compromise between experience and imagination, between desire and ability.  Perhaps the only escape from compromise is contradiction.

We are free to meet in that mysterious space between the play, as it was written by me, and the play, as it is experienced by an audience; that is where our difference might become our bond.

It is this possibility of community that draws me to theatre; the community possible between those who create theatre and those who witness it.  This possibility is one that can embrace difference while at the same time acknowledge what is common to us all.

I am here tonight because of my work in the theatre, because of my passion for it, because of what I share with you. 

To finish, I would like to tell you a story, a story about my life as a writer.  The story concerns Silent Partner. 

I wrote Silent Partner in New York.  I can't remember how long ago.  For me, it's ancient history.  But I know that I was in New York because a play of mine was opening there.  The play was called Isle of Swans.  It's a play that I would rather forget, for a number of reasons. 

An enormous amount of money was spent on the production.  The producer, who shall remain nameless, was an Australian lawyer who had what can only be described as 'romantic notions' concerning the theatre.  He liked the idea of being the producer of a New York play.  It was, I suppose, a kind of fantasy of his.  I became the focus of this fantasy.  I'm not sure how this happened.  I was young and poor and hopeful and I had written Isle of Swans.  I think it was the second or third play I had written.  It had been something of a success in Melbourne and Sydney.  I had directed the production.

In New York the play was a complete disaster.  It probably deserved to be, but my memories of it are vague.  I do remember that the New York Times critic thought that it was perhaps the worst play that he had ever seen. 

Once the play had closed, after two weeks, the producer went home to Australia, his tail between his legs, his wallet empty.  I was left in New York, penniless and homeless.  For some reason which now escapes me, I decided to stay, to 'tough it out' in this rather harsh city; and it is particularly harsh if you haven't got a cent to your name.  I found a place to stay, with a film maker I had met.  I could stay in her loft, but my room would have to be a tiny cubicle that I would share with an enormous gas fired furnace.

It was winter.  Outside it was snowing, but I lived in my underwear, sweating in my small cubicle that was as hot as an oven.  I borrowed a typewriter; I can't remember who was kind enough to lend it to me.  There was nothing wrong with the typewriter except that it lacked the letter 'e'.  It's very difficult to write anything if you don't have the letter 'e', which is the most commonly used letter in the English alphabet.  I simply left a gap, and wrote the letter in by hand. I was still hopeful.  I decided to write a play, a funny play.  I needed something funny in my life.

I also got a job in New York, using a false name and a false Social Security number.  I worked for a newspaper, The Boston Globe, conducting telephone surveys.  I made enough money to buy myself one meal each day.  I ate salad, as that was the cheapest thing to eat.  There was a store close to where I lived where you could buy salad by weight.  I would buy about 500 grams of salad a day: lettuce leaves, tomato, corn, cold potatoes.  Once a week, as a special treat, I bought myself a chocolate bar.  Within a few months I had lost so much weight that my pants kept falling down.  I couldn't afford to buy a belt.

It was during this time that I wrote Silent Partner; sweating in my underwear in a furnace room in New York, living on lettuce leaves and working on a typewriter without the letter 'e'.  I tried to make the play as funny as I could.  It's about two men who refuse to understand that they are beaten, who continue to believe in a fading possibility, who have absolutely nothing to depend on and yet remain hopeful.  Are they simply foolhardy or are they undying optimists?  Are they courageous or just plain ignorant?  I think that they are all of these things.  They are ridiculous characters, trapped somewhere between tragedy and comedy, as I was when I invented them.  I think of them fondly, and I'm glad that I wrote the play; but I never want to re-live the experience of writing it.