Though they might seem invisible, we’ve all seen them.
Ghosting away down school corridors, hiding behind shields of books, tablets or phones. Some of us have even been there, and remember the terrain. Adolescence can be a raw and unsettling time, but as Girl Asleep’s playwright Matthew Whittet suggests, it can also be a period of intense creative growth and speculation. The challenge of writing about a time of such upheaval from an adult perspective notwithstanding, the surreal story of a girl named Greta on the cusp of her 15th birthday was one Whittet couldn’t ignore.
“For some reason I find it quite a natural fit for my brain to think back to that period,” he says. “It’s like you have the chance to mash up the real and the not real, and that’s a world I understand. It becomes about memory, what it is to be a kid, and the way imaginations work as a kid. From that perspective, I find it a really interesting place to tell stories from.
“It’s such a great period of time in a person’s life, character-wise, to set drama, because when you’re a teenager, there’s all sorts of shit going on,” he laughs. “It’s big drama, but it tends to simultaneously be small-scale. You get to deal with some really interesting and fun issues. To enter into storytelling with people who are ridiculously excited or scared, that as adults, you look back and say, ‘Oh, come on, let’s not get too carried away here.’ But as a prism to tell stories through, it’s a bit of a favourite.”
Of course, it’s not just the high drama of adolescence that proves such fertile soil for storytelling. The reclusive teen who withdraws from the world, who sequesters themselves away in bedrooms and libraries – it is this troubled soul who arguably has some of the more curious dramatic qualities.
“I used Sleeping Beauty as a kind of very rough starting point, and picked apart what we found interesting there,” says Whittet. “We started to talk about this period in a lot of teenagers’ lives, especially the introverted ones, where they kind of just disappear. They’ll spend a lot of time in their bedrooms, you ask them how they are and it’s like they’ve gone to sleep. So we thought, ‘How do you take that somnambulistic idea and turn that into drama?’ What I wanted to explore was that on the outside, maybe she’s looking reserved and doesn’t want anything to do with anyone, but on the inside there’s an imaginative world which is bursting at the seams.”
And what an imagination that is. With its otherworldly characters and striking set design and costumes, Girl Asleep resembles an Anthony Neilson play as interpreted by Guillermo del Toro.
“I’ve always liked writing these big ideas,” Whittet says. “For instance, Greta goes into a frozen cave with this ice queen who kind of represents her mother, and she almost freezes to death. And at the end of the scene she realises to reach the next level of her quest inside this dream, she has to go and find a goblin, and the only way to get to the goblin is through this queen’s mouth. And you travel through her spit and phlegm to find the goblin – it’s just ridiculous. But the team just relish that. They find a way in which the set can now start to tell a story as well as everything else.
“I don’t always try to solve things through dialogue. I try to keep ideas open enough that everyone from each department can try and find a different way of solving that problem or telling that part of the story.”
[Girl Asleep photo by Brett Boardman]
Girl Asleep plays atBelvoir St Theatre, Friday December 2 – Saturday December 24.
