The Adelaide Repertory Theatre serves up turkey and yuletide turmoil in their rendering of British playwright Sam Holcroft’s 2015 play, 'Rules for Living'.
We carve up the work’s themes with director, Megan Dansie. With 'Rules For Living', the subject matter is something that everyone can relate to, the family Christmas gathering, and there is no better source for drama, is there?
That’s right, I think everybody has probably had a dreadful family Christmas or can imagine a dreadful family Christmas, and in this one we have all the elements. We have one of the sons bringing his girlfriend for the first [time], dad’s just coming out of hospital, another son’s marriage is rocky and then suddenly somebody says “let’s play a game” – that always goes well. In this case mum wants the Christmas to be perfect and of course it can never be as perfect as you wish it to be.
The playwright, Sam Holcroft, was inspired by dinner party plays and in Australia we have a big history of such plays, like 'Don’s Party', haven’t we?
Well yes. I directed 'Don’s Party' for The Adelaide Rep a few years ago and a few of my cast were in it, so it’s very interesting. This is obviously very different and it’s set in the modern day and not the '60s but the technicalities of having to appear to drink to excess while acting is certainly something that we’ve brought up.
Sam Holcroft is a young female playwright with an interesting background, having studied biology at university before working in theatre. How did you become familiar with her work?
I was lucky enough to be in the UK and the National Theatre of Great Britain has an outstanding bookshop, and basically I was strip mining the book shop and giving all the interesting looking plays the three page test, like your primary school teacher taught you to do if you like a book, and I found this and thought it was an intriguing idea.
On that idea, it’s not just a family gathering but the play’s narrative integrates the psychological concept of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). What kind of challenges does that present?
The idea of CBT in the play, and I’m the first to admit that I’m not a psychologist, is that everybody has their own unconscious rules that the operate under – especially with stressful situations – and sometimes those rules work very well, but sometimes they go to the extreme. [As the family gathering becomes more stressful, each character’s] rules come into play and become more elaborate. So for example, one of the characters has a rule that he must sit to tell a lie, which can be extremely funny because if he says “this tastes delicious” and he’s sitting down, we all know he’s lying. The very clever way that the playwright has done this is to have a scoreboard on stage which projects the rules.
