Three years ago Barking Gecko Theatre Company created a controversial play that looked into the lives of teenagers. This year at the Festival of Perth they are presenting the sequel to that work, ‘OneFiveZeroSeven’ tackles similar territory but takes a much larger view.
OUTinPerth editor Graeme Watson chatted to Barking Gecko’s Artistic Director John Sheedy (pictured) about the creation of the play.
It’s unusual to see a sequel in the theatre.
Yes it is, but I think it was necessary with this project, after ‘Driving Into Walls’. We had such a great response from ‘Driving Into Walls’ at that started off as a project for teenagers.
So being the Artistic Director of Barking Gecko, when I started here I thought if I’m going to create works for young people, then let’s go meet young people and make a work that’s about them and written by them and for them. So that’s what the birth of ‘Driving Into Walls’ was.
That process, regardless of what your age is always seems to be completely enlightening.
It was completely enlightening! Suzie Miller, the playwright, and I went on a big tour over eight weeks. We did two separate four week long research developments. We went up north to remote indigenous communities, we stayed here in central Perth, we went down south to Albany, we went to the Wheatbelt. We tried to cover as much as we could. We went to public schools, private schools, skate parks, community centres and we interviewed lots of teenagers and found out what they thought about life here in WA.
We also gave them a video camera and asked them to tell the video camera something that they had never told anyone before. We ended up getting over five hundred confessions and we put that all into this one show called ‘Driving Into Walls’. It was on in 2011, it sold out and it was quite controversial, in a good way. Then it was picked up for a tour to the east and had a sold out season at the Opera House and at Riverside in Paramatta. It’s about to go to Brisbane for a season too.
It’s had such a wonderful response and all the feedback we’ve had from teenagers, and parents and teachers and people just tell us that they want more work like this. So we cracked a teenage market and saw there was a demand for teenage works. So we said, “We should turn this into a trilogy”.
So the second part ‘OneFiveZeroSeven’ is on a national level. So we’ve gone from state to national and the third one will be international. It’s the same team and so Susie and I went on a whirlwind tour around Australia and we’ve interviewed over 1200 teenagers. Again, we asked them what their life is like in each state, what they think it is to be a young Australian and what we’d like to do in the future.
From doing this process the first time, did you see any major changes or trends in the answers you got?
There are some things about teenagers that will never differ, there are things that are the same now as when you and I were teenagers. One big change is that when I was a teenager there was no internet.
So now it’s the iGen, all of their lives are plugged in, and they are exposed 24/7 if it’s not Facebook, it’s Instagram, they are plugged in for their whole lives. So the social aspect is so different because they go home and still socialise online rather than going out. Of course, they still go out, of course they do, but it keeps going online. That’s the same in every state and event the kid in the most remote part of central Australia has internet access. Even if they have to walk for two hours to get it.
It was fascinating to see the difference between each state and the young people and what they think of each state and the politics of Australia. From Australia Day to refugees to more personal things.
The big focus we did on this one was going in to their inner sanctum, their bedroom and asking what were the things that they own, the object that make up who they are.
Throughout the year Suzie Miller has been researching and getting heaps of statistics and putting it all together. We number crunched and the average number of items owned by a teenager is 1507 objects.
It seems like a phenomenal amount of stuff!
It is, but when you think about it that’s everything. Their shows, their clothing, their books, their pencils, their make up, their music.
We forget what it was like when you were a teenager and everything you owned was kept in this cave of your bedroom.
We counted everything, their bedding, their 1000 songs on their iPod, the jar of M&M’s next to their wed, all of that. To me that is absolutely fascinating. So we kind of stuck with that and looked at that.
Suzie Miller is really amazing, she’s an internationally recognised playwright, shes Australian and we’ve done many plays together. She also has a background in law and was a practicing lawyer and she’s got a background in medicine. She’s a bit of a brainiac. But she has incredible access to all these statistics. So 1507 is also the number of emotional moment a teenager will experience over a week, that’s what they’ll go through.
We had an incredible amount of teenagers independently buying tickets to ‘Driving Into Walls’, we got them away from their screens. They cheered and they laughed and they said ‘Finally, this is actually right, this is actually validated.”
Now we’re doing the same thing at a national level, our approach is always not to edit, it’s verbatim. It’s a one hour piece that is unedited from what people said. It’s text and movement and it’s confronting, it humorous, it’s hilarious and it’s touching. It’s all the things that a teenager goes through in those transition years. I think teenager are so interesting because they are so complex.
Does it make you wish you could go back to your teenage years and do it all again?
Isn’t that always the wish, if I could go back knowing what I know now.
OneFiveZeroSeven is playing at the Subiaco Arts Centre until March 1st. Find out all the details here.
Graeme Watson, Feature image: Cameron Etchells
