‘The forest where they go,’ says psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, ‘symbolises the place in which inner darkness is confronted and worked through; where uncertainty is resolved about who one is; and where one begins to understand who one wants to be.’ Adolescence is like a forest; it’s a time of life that some merrily skip through, some struggle through and for some, a place they enter but never come out the other side. It’s a place of beauty, horror and a place where you can easily come undone.
Over the past six years I have been collaborating with Matthew Whittet to deliver teenage stories to the stage. This time of life, the teenage years, provides us very fertile terrain as it is here we really begin to understand ourselves as individuals, separate from our parents and family, and on the cusp of self-determining who we might be and how we will live. This awareness comes with other realisations, like the parents you may have held on a pedestal are actually fallible, maybe even embarrassing, and that there is a social hierarchy, a pecking order, that must be negotiated and it can be brutal.
In our theatre making we love to capitalise on the live nature of the experience. We rely on our inventiveness and our audience’s imagination to realise impossible things. Our theatre work has been deeply shaped by the screen – the dominant artistic medium of our lifetime – so it was a tremendous adrenaline rush to have the opportunity to use the capacities of this medium; things like multiple locations, editing and point of view, and to make an actual film! But we also wanted to hold dear to our lateral natures evolved in the theatre. Our artists, like scenic designer Jonathon Oxlade and sound designer Luke Smiles, were thrilled to collaborate with film artists, like DOP Andrew Commis and editor Karryn de Cinque. There was lot of creative joy in our coming together and being able to embrace and absorb our respective art forms and create this hybrid storytelling – the realised world of Greta Driscoll and the story of Girl Asleep.
