Tinkertown: an interview with Nathaniel Moncrieff and Sam Farringdon

Last week I caught up with Perth playwright Nathaniel Moncrieff and producer and co-director Sam Farringdon, who talked at length about Nathaniel’s new play – Tinkertown. Tinkertown follows on from Sleepyhead, which was both a critical and commercial success when it was performed at the Blue Room earlier this year.

Tinkertown is a tragic comedy with plenty of dark humour and combines car chases with dysfunctional father/daughter bonding, music and yaks, apparently. Oh, and nudity – so be warned!

You can check out Tinkertown at The Blue Room between September 25 and October 13. Visit the website for tickets and relevant information.

What’s the inspiration behind Tinkertown?

Nathaniel:

       Tinkertown was written about two years ago; it came after I had written Sleepyhead. Sleepyhead started getting attention; it had picked up an award and was short listed for the Griffin Award and after that the attention had gone to my head and I had spent six months or more working on an epic Victorian horror piece that was a weird combination of Kafka and Henry James…

Sam:

         And self indulgence.

N & S: laughs

N:     …and Oscar Wilde, and when that wasn’t getting positive reactions from the people I sent it to, I decided I needed to write something more contained. I worked on an idea I had been tossing around for a while, which was pitched somewhere between Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and a 70’s road movie, and that was what was to become Tinkertown. I wrote the first draft in about a week and it came after a bad time in my life, so the original draft was a strange amalgam of heavy emotions and also…

S:     Trademarked Moncrieffian bleakness.

N & S: laughs

N:     …humour, I was going to say! So that’s how Tinkertown initially came about. I sent that around and it got a lot of interest from a few people. Sam really liked it and that spurred me on in terms of subsequent drafts. Eventually I was to hone it to what it is now.

During our last interview you mentioned that Tinkertown was meant as a companion to Sleepyhead. Is that still the case, and if so can you elaborate on that?

N:      I think that Tinkertown and Sleepyhead are stylistically similar and in   some other respects…

S:      Thematically as well, because they are about family relationships.           

N:      Yeah, thematically both are concerned in some ways with father/daughter dynamics and I think even from the outset I wanted to write another piece that would complement the style of Sleepyhead. I think while some of the themes and the dialogue and certain aspects of the world of the play cross over with Sleepyhead, Tinkertown differs in terms of being much lighter in tone. Whereas Sleepyhead was a very claustrophobic piece, Tinkertown is much more expansive in its setting, and the journey that takes place is a much more physical one, compared to the metaphorical one in Sleepyhead. 

S:      Tinkertown is a lot more accessible I think.

N:      Yeah, a lot of people will find Tinkertown more enjoyable and accessible than Sleepyhead.

Would you say it’s a progression from Sleepyhead? 

N:      I learned a lot from Sleepyhead about how audiences react to work and interpret a work. How you convey narrative elements to an audience, what needs to be explained, what doesn’t need to be explained, but also how to write humour as well. I always thought Sleepyhead was a very funny play, but as the play was so dark audiences tended to miss the humour. So that was very important to me when I wrote Tinkertown – how to incorporate the dark elements whilst not interfering with the humour.

Tinkertown has been performed in Melbourne, how did that go?

N:      I very much liked what MKA did with the play. MKA are, to my mind, one of the most exciting companies producing works in Australia at the moment. I feel privileged that they have now done two of my plays. What was unfortunate was that I don’t think Tinkertown was quite at the stage that it is now when it was produced, so while MKA did the best they could with the play, at that stage I had not yet heard the play read aloud or seen it performed live, so after I went over to Melbourne to see it performed. I immediately went back and re-worked a lot of it, so the Perth production will be a lot more finely honed.

So, that was my next question, is the Perth production very different to the Melbourne production? 

S:      Just about every week! laughs

N:      Yeah. It’s been great working on the play as co-director because it’s given me free reign to re-work and re-write the elements that I didn’t think were working or could be improved. I am quite a perfectionist when it comes to my writing, so I have been a bit of an annoyance at times to Sam and some of the actors, in terms of cutting lines and adding lines. I think that ultimately that will be a huge benefit to the script; it’s a much sharper, tighter work than it would have been had I not directed it.

Nathaniel and Sam

Tinkertown is being co-directed with Sam Farringdon. Sam - how did that come about and what did you contribute as co-director?

S:      I just imposed myself on Nathaniel’s work (laughs) and he just lets me do that. Obviously I read the very first draft of the script and immediately I fell in love with it. I had read a lot of Nathaniel’s previous scripts, they were mostly film scripts at that point, and when I read Tinkertown I immediately recognised that it was the most accessible thing he’d ever written. It’s funny, because I actually went back and read the first draft a couple of weeks ago, and compared to where it is now, the thing is actually a mess – but that’s only in the context of what I know the script to be now, in the process of the last year and a half of it being re-tooled. So I think that it really was quite something when I first read it, and that’s something that has carried on until now. In terms of my role in our relationship, I joked before that Nat brings the creativity and I bring the organisation and the practicality, and that’s really quite true to a certain extent. Nathaniel and I work very well together because we share a lot of the same artistic passions and ideas, and we bounce of each other quite well. We can throw ideas back and forth and reign in each other’s more outlandish ideas, or recast them as something that works a lot better for both of us. 

You produced Sleepyhead, is directing more of a challenge?

S:      Well I am producing Tinkertown as well. Producing and directing is a huge challenge in that it’s essentially twice the amount of work, but the way that we had planned it was that I was always going to produce and provide assistance in terms of direction, and Nathaniel would take on the most of the direction. That’s pretty much how it’s worked, but at the same time the direction has been collaborative and that’s something that I have really enjoyed. It has been really quite difficult at times, but it has been made considerably easier with the support we got from The Blue Room and also the support from our mentor, Mark Storen. He’s an amazing actor, writer and director in his own right…

N:      An incredible person all round…

S:      Yeah, he’s an incredible guy. The actors that we’ve had: Phil Moilin, Tessa Carmody, Hannah Day and Jeremy Levi – they interpret our vague, overlapping ideas and messy direction and deliver them to a tee, giving us what we want.

Sam - has this given you any ideas of your own, in terms of writing?

S:       It’s certainly inspired me. I have always written stuff, I just never really shared it with people, and I always tended to write more poetry and short prose rather than plays. It certainly has inspired me, and working with Nathaniel and Mark and Phil, Tessa, Hannah and Jeremy has inspired me to work on something of my own writing. I am really just happy to be involved in the whole creative process; it’s just fantastic to be among creative people and to be creating a piece of art. That’s exciting in itself and I hope to continue that. Regardless whether I continue to write, as long as I am around these creations, the creative process and these creative people I am quite content.

Nathaniel, Tinkertown has been described as a tragic comedy. Are you attracted to this genre or is it more of a means to get across what you are trying to say?

N:      I think all my work ends up being incredibly dark one way or another, it’s just the kinds of characters I’m attracted to, the kinds of stories I want to tell, so even if I aim to do a light comedy, which I aimed for with Tinkertown, it ends up being something quite twisted and quite dark. I don’t intend to write tragedies; just often the stories that linger in my mind and end up coming to fruition end up being grim in nature.

S:      Well, all the anecdotes that you tell, the stories from your own life are tragic comedies as well…

N:      Yeah, I think my sense of humour is kind of bent - I have a very dark sense of humour and that is reflected in my work. Even Sleepyhead, I thought that was a very funny play, it turned out that not that many people thought it was quite as funny as I did.

S:      The comedy in Sleepyhead was much more subtle, you have to be looking for it to find it in parts of it.

N:      This play gives the audience more permission to laugh. I think in Sleepyhead, because from the outset it’s such a grim world with characters that are so irredeemably messed up, that when the humour enters into the picture it’s harder for the audience to realize they’re allowed to laugh. I think Tinkertown from it’s very first line tells the audience what sort of play it is going to be and what sort of humour it’s going to possess. I think audiences will have a much easier time enjoying the comedy in this play.

Phil Miolin as Chester

Tell me about the character Chester?

N:      Chester is a character that is looking for redemption. He wants to fix his failed existence – he’s murdered his wife, he’s spent most of his life behind bars, and so he’s come out and he wants to make things right with his daughter. He’s such a fuck up, for want of a better term, that he just keeps making situations worse for himself. The reunion with his daughter just doesn’t go to plan, and that’s where we begin the play. From there it’s all downhill, one mistake after another.

S:      His intentions are always good, but he just doesn’t think things through enough for them to happen quite the way he intends them to.

N:      Yeah, he’s got a skewed way of thinking and he’s got a very skewed sense of honour, which…

S:      Which probably comes from his life behind bars and having to justify his way of life.

Tell me about Tammy, Chester’s daughter?

N:      Tammy is the antithesis of Chester because she’s been estranged from him since she was a baby, and was raised by her mother’s sister, who was a strict religious woman. She was raised in a very morally upright environment, so when they meet at the beginning of the play they are at complete odds in terms of beliefs and ethics. That sets the dynamic for the rest of the play, in terms of these characters who want to get along but just can’t, because they’re different in almost every respect.

S:      Tammy’s moral compass is a bit skewed as well, but it’s skewed towards righteousness, that’s where a lot of the conflict arises.

N:      Tammy has a lot of her father in her, but she’s in denial of that fact. The more she spends time with Chester the more her darker side comes out.

Felicity Groom

The music is performed by Felicity Groom, how did that collaboration come about? Does she perform live?

S:      Yes, she performs live. When we started talking about Tinkertown as a Blue Room show we were really adamant that it would be scored by live music, as music was a huge part of the influence for Nathaniel. I could hear the sounds for the music echo throughout the script. That was a reason that I think it resonated with me so much. Felicity was an acquaintance of mine, and when we were throwing ideas around as to how we could approach the live music her name came up because we really thought that her music had a haunting, ethereal quality to it that was fitting to the landscape and mood of the piece.

She’d worked on something for Renee Newman-Storen, Mark Storen’s wife at the Blue Room, which was received really well. So we arranged a meeting with her and she’s really lovely and very hardworking and was very passionate about the project as soon as she’d read the script. So all the stars aligned and it worked out for the best.

N:      When I wrote Tinkertown I was listening to a lot of folk music and a lot of blues and country music. Stuff like Jackson C. Frank and Townes Van Zandt – artists like that, and so the first draft of the script were very much littered with a lot of musical references and so music was very important to the world of the play. When we conceived the piece we really wanted a songwriter to come along and not only enhance the mood of the piece, but to also compliment the narrative. The example that comes to mind is Curtis Mayfield and the Superfly soundtrack, in which the film and the soundtrack are almost synonymous because the lyrics heighten the narrative and they really add a lot of depth and convey a lot of different angles and elements to the audience.

S:      It’s important to know that when Felicity’s on stage she’s a part of the world; very much omnipresent within the world, and her music expresses the mood and landscape of the piece. That was really important to colour the play. It’s not a case of her tacking on her music in between scenes, her music lives and breathes within the scenes and it gives the show as much life as the characters of Tammy and Chester do.

N:      Yeah, Felicity really has a knack of connecting with the play, her music and her lyrics really tapped into what I was going for when I wrote the piece. A lot of aspects of the characterisation that I didn’t discuss with her, she just automatically picked up upon. She’s done a fantastic job.

What else have you been working on? How’s Turn of the Screw coming along? Have you given up on it?

N:      The Turn of the Screw play I think is a tremendous piece of work, it’s sort of like Victorian Gothic Psychedelia.

S:      If that’s even a genre? It’s Moncrieffian! 

N:      It’s incredibly grotesque work and I’m not sure at this point in my career that it would be wise to unleash it – it’s experimental and certainly my most fucked up play. Not to mention that it would also be an incredibly costly piece of work. If any supremely well-funded organisations showed interest and were willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a play and potentially lose it, then I’d say I’d have one piece of work for them to see. It might fall by the wayside. But I have been working on another epic, completely uncommercial piece of work.

S:      I wouldn’t call it uncommercial, it’s just very very black.

N:      It’s almost at its first draft stage and I’m very happy with the way it’s going. It’s based on a true story so I’ve had to do a lot of research and work hard to combine the real life and fictionalized elements. It will be by far my ambitious work. It will be quite a few months before anyone will get to look at it, besides Sam I guess.

Is there anything else you’d like to say in general or about Tinkertown? Come and see it?

        

S:      It’s worth mentioning that we’ve had a huge amount of love and support from everyone involved at The Blue Room: Susannah, Thom, Kerry Roger and Sally. They’ve been hugely supportive from the beginning. As first time director doing their first show we are extremely grateful. It’s great to work under the banner of a theatre company that is recognized for excellent work. It’s a huge honour.

N:      We are very grateful. Also we wouldn’t be talking now if it weren’t for MKA and their ongoing support, both with Sleepyhead and this play. The Blue Room have been hugely supportive. We have an amazing crew as well.

S:      They’ve worked with enthusiasm and commitment. We really have the most talented people and it’s mind boggling just how great it is to work with these people and it will hopefully all show through in the final result.

Credits: Photographs of Nathaniel, Sam, Phil Miolin and Felicity Groom by Sophia Muoio

Sleepyhead, an interview with Nathaniel Moncrieff

A few nights ago I caught up with Perth playwright – Nathaniel Moncrieff (pictured above), for a chat about his play Sleepyhead. Nathaniel is an emerging playwright who has already experienced significant success. Nathaniel won the Di Cranston Award for Sleepyhead in 2009 and in 2010 it was short listed for the Griffin Award. Sleepyhead was performed to rave reviews in Melbourne in 2011:

“A masterpiece” – Liam Pieper, Rabbit Hole Urban Music

“An evocative, first-class dramatic experience” – Cheryl Threadgold, Melbourne Observer

“Intense, but worth every minute of it. Highly recommended!” – Alan O’Riordan, Theatre Alive

When did you start writing creatively?

I think I’ve always been writing. My father was a writer and he was always encouraging me to write and in my teens I wrote a lot of prose. I wrote a novel when I was 17 or 18 – which was awful but it got me going.

I wrote short stories and I won a short story competition when I was about 20, a national one (The Katharine Susannah Prichard National Short Story Competition), and then I studied film, which got me into film writing, which then eventually evolved into playwrighting.

So what kind of a writer was your father?

My father wrote for the theatre. He also wrote poetry and prose and in the last decade or two he’s written non-fiction. Yeah, so I owe the inclination to write to my father.

Why plays? What attracted you to this genre?

I loved theatre and I loved certain playwrights. Certainly when I was writing for film a number of playwrights influenced my style and my style was very theatrical, but at the same time I had an interest to move into theatre.

At that stage I didn’t know anyone in the theatre. Apart from being in a few plays at high school I didn’t really have any links to the theatre world, but after I graduated from uni my cousin, who acted in a number of my short films, founded his own theatre company and asked me to write a play for him, and I did – it wasn’t very good, but it got me into writing plays. 

After that I got into writing another play called Motel Rooms and I knew that it was, if not good, that it was at least something different for me, something interesting and I’d found a new style. So I sent it off to the Australian Theatre for Young People, because they were giving professional feedback and they liked the play so much that they asked me to join the Fresh Ink Program for young writers. They flew me over to Sydney a few times to participate in workshops and paired me with a mentor, who was Sam Strong from Belvoir at the time, but now he’s with the Griffin Theatre. He helped me develop Motel Rooms but eventually it was a play that couldn’t be salvaged and I got sidetracked by this play, the first draft of which I’d written within a week. That play was Sleepyhead.

What inspired this play?

I’d found a certain style with Motel Rooms. The style of that play had a slight gothic edge to it, it had a real Sam Shepherd quality to it and it was very low key, which was something different from my previous works that were a bit over the top and unrestrained. Sleepyhead was an extension of that, but at the same time it was a much more personal piece as it was written during a dark time personally and it was quite a cathartic play to write, because a lot of those feelings came out in the play.

It came about because of an old idea I had, a screenplay idea I had in about 1997. I had been reading a lot of Southern Gothic female authors, like Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Barbara Gowdy. Barbara Gowdy is a Canadian author but she writes in a Southern Gothic vein. That was the gestation of it, but the central idea stuck with me so when I returned to it, because of where I was personally during that period, it became a lot darker, a lot funnier but at the same time quite bleak.

Initially, as I was writing it for a film I abandoned it, because I only had the first act and I wasn’t sure where to go from there. 

What is the major theme of this play?

The central theme of the play is loneliness. Which was sort of what I was feeling at the time. I recall writing the play in a very small room that I was staying in at the time and even subsequent drafts of the play were written in a bush retreat – the Arthur Boyd Artist’s Retreat in rural NSW. A beautiful location, very atmospheric and very haunting. So that was very important to the writing of the piece and it sort of assisted the really isolated atmosphere of the play.

I think all my plays tend to be set in very isolated locations and usually this is reflected in the characters. The characters are usually somewhat grotesque and very much outsiders.

What challenges did you face whilst preparing this play for the audience?

Well, with this play I was very lucky, the Fresh Ink Program gave me lots of opportunities to work with people like Sam Strong and Fraser Caufield and also the other writers involved in the program. There was a lot of feedback, which was a great help since it was only really my second attempted play. Technically it was my third play, as I had written a play before Motel Rooms and I had written a few shorter works that had been performed. But in the end it was the first play that was completed, that I was happy with, that I would show people. With that play I was lucky because there was a lot of help there for an inexperienced writer.

Once the feedback I had received gave me enough confidence to get the play out there, I sent it off to the Fellowship of Australian Writers – just on a whim. It was a couple of days before the entries closed for their National Literary Awards. A few months later (in 2009) I got the letter saying I had won the Di Cranston award and that’s when I realised the play’s done – I can put this play to bed now. Not to say that I did, because working with Yvonne Virsik, who directed the Melbourne production, and Garreth Bradshaw, who’s directing the Perth production, I’ve gone back to it and hearing the play aloud has helped me to hear the imperfections within the work and so I’ve been able to hone it in the months since. 

So has there been a difference with the directors?  Did they each bring their own thing to the play?

There is and I think it’s interesting in terms of seeing a male director and a female director approach the play because there’s a lot of darkness in the play, but it’s up to the director to decide what they want to bring out – whether they want to focus on the violent undercurrent or focus on the more hopeful aspects of the play.  So I think Yvonne’s production, which I thought was brilliant, was a very subtle and sensitive adaptation of the work and I couldn’t have been happier with it.

Garreth has a different approach and I think it will be a very interesting approach all the same - he’s found more uncompromising aspects in the work. I think it will be more masculine and there will be more violence, antagonism and more of the uncomfortable themes being brought to the surface. I think the final product will be very different to the Melbourne production, but Garreth has a really strong vision for the piece and I think it will be every bit as striking and effective.

So you’re happy with this production?

Yeah, I’m very happy. The Melbourne production was great, because when I went in to see it performed I went in blind – I hadn’t attended any of the rehearsals. I had conversed with the director from afar but when I saw it I didn’t know what to expect and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

With the Perth production I’ve attended the majority of the rehearsals. I’ve been more involved from the get-go, including the publicity, so I think it’s been really good because I’ve been able to hear the work performed and help the actors with their questions in relation to the ambiguities of the work and also help them with certain stylistic aspects of the script. It’s been a learning process as well. Up until May last year when Sleepyhead was performed I was writing primarily in a void. When I would write, it would be entirely how I would hear the dialogue, how I would perform the dialogue, so it was unbelievably beneficial to hear the work performed aloud to know what works, what doesn’t work, what is too much and what isn’t enough. It's also been wonderful having a close friend of mine, Sam Farringdon, working as producer. He's very protective of the work and what more can a writer ask for?

Who are your favourite playwrights and how have they influenced you?

From a purely stylistic perspective I love the work of David Mamet, his rhythms are so specific – if you read his plays they’re almost like music. I also very much admire Harold Pinter. What I love about his work is a lot of the time it’s not about what’s on the page, but about what isn’t on the page.

I am also fond of Neil Labute, Samuel Beckett and Martin Crimp. John Hopkins is a particularly underrated British playwright. He wrote a fabulous play called This Story of Yours, which was adapted into a great Sean Connery movie called The Offence. Jules Feiffer is also another one, he wrote a few plays and screenplays that are really good.

In terms of Sleepyhead I’d say more than anything it was prose authors, such as the Southern Gothic novelists. Flannery O’Connor has always been one of my favourite writers and her influence on Sleepyhead was considerable.

Who are your favourite writers?

Richard Brautigan, J. G. Ballard, Martin Amis, Newton Thornburg, Raymond Carver, Robert Coover, Franz Kafka and Vladimir Nabakov - there’s too many; I could go on all night! 

Do you have any advice for would-be playwrights?

My advice would be to get the work out there, particularly to enter it in awards and competitions. To get people wanting to perform your work I think is the most important thing. I think you can’t give any better advice than to just get it read.

It’s terrifying and it may backfire, you may get an entirely negative response, but from what I’ve found if somebody hates your play it doesn’t mean it’s a bad work. The last play I wrote, the first person I showed didn’t like it at all, tore it to pieces and I was disheartened. I had to go away and really think about how do I take on all this criticism, do I start completely from scratch or do I trust my own instincts and decide what I think is good and make a compromise between what I think and what this other person thought? So I did that, I went away and I worked on it and that play is getting performed in Melbourne in late February. That play is called Tinkertown.

What does the future hold?

That’s the play (Tinkertown) that I’ve spent more or less the last year writing. Again, I wrote a few plays between the time of Sleepyhead, which was written in 2009 and this play, which I began writing in late 2010. Again, like Sleepyhead, it was written during another time of sadness and turmoil. I see this as a companion piece to Sleepyhead. In terms of genre it’s more a tragic comedy than the gothic/thriller/horror of Sleepyhead, but stylistically and thematically I see a lot in common with the two. So that play has been picked up by MKA who did Sleepyhead as well and they are doing it in conjunction with Theatreworks in late February, so I am looking forward to that.

I have also been honing another play which I wrote before Tinkertown and that play is probably best defined as Victorian Gothic, probably more in the vein of the Henry James novella - Turn of the Screw, with a bit of Oscar Wilde and Kafka thrown in for good measure. That work stylistically was a lot more undisciplined and unhinged and so needed a lot more honing and toning down, but it’s nearing completion, so hopefully in a couple of months I’ll have that ready to send to people.

Do you think you’ll ever write novels?

I’d like to return to writing prose. The primary failing of my prose writing was being too young and too eager to prove myself as a writer and so my prose was very undisciplined - it was very impenetrable and overtly poetic. I’d like to return to it and as you get older you realise that often simpler is better. When time permits I would like to return to prose.

Lastly - how much do you love books? Would you ever buy a Kindle?

I don’t think I will ever buy a Kindle and I’m sure people argue for their convenience and whatnot, but nothing can replicate the look of a book, the smell of a book, the glory of having books piled and stacked. I own hundreds upon hundreds of books and I know the majority I will never have the time to read in my lifetime, but it doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy owning them.

Please look at the Sleepyhead promo here

There is also a promo for Nathaniel’s new play - Tinkertown, which is being premiered by MKA at Theatreworks in Melbourne next month.

Sleepyhead is showing at The Blue Room between Monday February 6 and Friday February 10. The play is directed by Garreth Bradshaw and produced by Sam Farringdon. The performers include: Amy Murray, Louise Cocks, Alex Jones, Adam Shuttleworth, Kirsty Marillier and Desiree Crossing.

Show time is at 9pm The Blue Room Theatre - 53 James St, Perth Cultural Centre, Northbridge

Bookings via The Blue Room can be found here

Tickets via Fringeworld are also available here

There is also a Facebook event page

Thanks go out to Elizabeth for helping to transcribe the interview.