Passion, commitment and dedication: Playwright's future assured

If Jonathan Gavin ever doesn't answer your phone call, it might just be because he's in a "creative burst". Troy Dodds reports...

David Williamson is probably Australia's best playwright, and certainly the most well-known. It's not always that his plays are works of creative genius, but he knows how to connect with an audience so well that his work has been the bread and butter for some of our biggest theatre companies for longer than most care to remember.

As Williamson's career winds down (though he uses the word retirement like it's going out of fashion), a new generation of playwrights must emerge, particularly to ensure Australian-made content remains in our theatres. Meet Jonathan Gavin - the 34-year-old Sydney-sider, who started his passion for writing at an extremely young age, devising plays with his sister.

"In the first one I remember, Little Red Riding Hood did battle with a witch who was killing children by poisoning their Coca-Cola," Gavin said.

"We followed up that runaway success with a sequel in which Little Red Riding Hood did battle with the Easter Bunny, who was killing children by poisoning their Easter eggs. We eventually moved on from the poisoning theme, but it was a beauty because it meant that we got to do all sorts of dramatic deaths in the performances."

Childhood memories aside, Gavin has developed into one of the country's top emerging playwrights, and his latest work Tiger Country plays as part of the Griffin Theatre Company's Stablemates program later this year.

"Tiger Country is three plays in one," Gavin explains. "First, it's a Christmas comedy set in the outskirts of Sydney. Second, it's a family drama concerning the rivalry between three brothers and their wives. And third, it's a satirical meditation on certain trends I think I see in the world. I can't help but think that we are becoming more insular, more selfish, and we are taking less and less responsibility for the consequences of our actions. The family in the play is one in which what's right is less important than what can be got away with."

One thing you can say about those working in the theatre industry is that money isn't foremost in their minds. After all, no matter what level of the industry you work in, big cheques are a rarity.

Gavin fits the bill perfectly.

"I'm not in any way a careerist and I don't care much about money, so the biggest difficulties I face as a playwright are creative," he said.

"I constantly run up against my own desire to be better than I am. The solitude required for writing often means I don't answer the phone or check my emails, which can be frustrating for other people. And then, again, there's that wish that I were better than I am."

Gavin has benefited from Sydney's encouraging independent theatre scene, which just happened to be finding its feet when he hit the scene a decade ago. It tied in well in building his knowledge as a playwright, and his CV as an actor, which he is equally passionate about.

"When I finished WAAPA at the end of 1998, the TRS was only a year old, there was no B Sharp, the Darlinghurst Theatre Company was still in the Wayside Chapel, and in January there was the Sydney Fringe Festival," he said.

"I went immediately into rehearsals for a show that played at the Bondi Pavilion during the 1999 Fringe Festival. I also promised myself that whatever happened I would do at least one fringe show a year, to keep me honest.

"The feeling at that time was one of defiance. Not mean-spirited defiance, I hasten to add, more self-empowerment. There was not enough work to sustain or to satisfy the huge number of talented artists in the city, so rather than lie fallow hoping the phone would ring, they put their imagination and skills together to create small-scale, low financial risk theatre in some of Sydney's small venues (like the Old Fitz, the Tap Gallery, Side On). We were here and we wanted to work on our craft, so we made the opportunity ourselves.

"The thriving fringe was boosted by the fact that there were fewer and fewer fully paid opportunities, which meant there were more and more terrific actors, writers, directors, and designers available and wanting to work. As the Darlo opened, and B Sharp began, the face of the fringe began to shift. I don't like saying that it got more 'respectable' but it's something along those lines. It started calling itself 'Indy Theatre', and it gathered momentum. Great new plays, great actors, directors, designers.

"And recently, it has been making a lot of people very angry. One friend of mine said that 'the fringe experiment has legitimised unpaid work'. That caught me completely off guard. I'd always thought of the fringe as the place for recklessness, new talent, and the chance to do the things we trained to do when there is an overabundance of artists in comparison to the number of shows produced professionally. There is a point of view now, though, that too many artists are doing too many underfunded shows.

"What it suggests is that there is no longer a thing that can be artistically differentiated from the rest and called the mainstream. Certainly, there are some artists who work exclusively on funded shows, and some who work exclusively on 'indy' shows. However there are many, many more whose careers take them between those two economic shores. Money is the new distinction between the 'mainstream' and the 'fringe'. The artists just want to be working."

Gavin's work includes Aperture and Bender for the Tamarama Rock Surfers, Schmaltz for Elbow Theatre, Sleepless Night for the Practical Theatre Company, and A Moment on the Lips for Maelstrom, for which he was awarded the 2003 Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award.

Gavin's next project is starring in the Peter Quilter play Glorious at the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney.

"It's about the life of Florence Foster-Jenkins, the world's worst soprano. Noelene Brown is playing Florence and Sandra Bates is directing. We open in October. Then there's Tiger Country at the Stables in November, directed by Johnny Sheedy. In December I start rehearsals for John Bell's production of As You Like It with the Bell Shakespeare Company - and I can't wait."

The next David Williamson? Comparisons will always be made, but Gavin proves that working through Sydney's independent scene can indeed create a profile, and perhaps we'll be seeing him on Sydney's, and maybe even the world's, biggest stages in the not too distant future.

And hey, if the writing thing doesn't work out, starring in shows with the Ensemble and Bell Shakespeare companies isn't a bad Plan B.