Streamers, glitter, paper lanterns, alcohol, a video camera, a scribbled banner, scrawled over scripts: Sweet Bird andsoforth has been rehearsing. Written by new German voice Laura Naumann, translated by rising Sydney actor and director Ben Winspear and directed by the multi-talented widely experienced Laura Scrivano, Sweet Bird is an exhilarating international experiment. We talked to Laura Scrivano.
So tell us about Sweet Bird. Why put it on?
Last year I was looking for something to do in an independent sense, and this play came up. I knew Laura (Naumann) from InterPlay, the international play writing festival I tutored at in 2009. At that point a friend of hers had translated it, and the translation, we knew from talking to Laura, wasn’t great. Despite this, we knew it was a unique play. She has a unique and original way of expressing herself; there’s a beautiful, poetic, almost Chekhovian sensibility about her work. Ben Winspear, who’s known as an actor and director, I found out he could speak German, and I thought I could get a translation that was dramaturgical rather than literal. Last year we did a three week creative development with some of the cast and we went from there, re-translating the play.
What I found really great about the piece is that it captures a time in your life that we’ve all been through, that period between being a teenager and becoming an adult, between seventeen and twenty one, that period of transition, deciding what you’re going to do with your life. Reading the play, it really captured that amazing energy and poetry and that incredible moment where you know that tomorrow, everything’s going to be different. It has some really beautiful characterisations, people you know, people I grew up with. There’s a real sense of who will get out, who will escape the town, and without giving too much away, it’s not the ones that you think are going to get away. To me the play is like Chekhov meets Skins, Bill Henson meets Inbetweeners, there’s a beautiful poetic sense to it and also a gutsy, gritty, visceral feel.
There seems to be a lot of collaborative effort. How closely did you work with Laura and Ben?
Because Ben was in Sydney, I worked really closely with him, we’d talk every step of the translation, even now we’re re-translating some things. Obviously, with Laura in Germany, we had the electronic collaboration, through emails and skype. Even now in rehearsal, I’m sending her questions. She’s coming out for the last week of rehearsals, so it will be a lot more hands on. That’s going to be a scary moment, because it’s the kind of play that’s really open to interpretation, which is great as a director. It’s also been through the whole translation process, so it will be really interesting to see her reaction when she comes out. Also, German theatre is very much director’s theatre, stage directions get blacked out before directors ever see the piece, which is so different to English theatre traditions, where the writer is god. It’ll be interesting.
We’re trying to share the creative process with everyone. We have the blog (http://sweetbirdandsoforth.com/) where we record the rehearsal process so people can see what goes into a show. Theatre feels like a very closed book a lot of the time, and I really like the democratisation of that secret world.
What is your ideal audience for this?
I think it’s pretty universal, because so long as you’re older than sixteen, you’ve had that moment, everyone has had that process of becoming an adult, that this play evokes. And it’s very funny, which appeals to everyone. But very specifically, if you’re sixteen to thirty, you’ve just gone through that stage or are still going through that stage and it will have an even sharper resonance for you. It’s quite cinematic as well, you have scenes that feel like montage or jump cuts or split screen, things happening simultaneously. We’re using a lot of AV in the piece, projecting on and around the stage, which will be on an angle, using live feeds, so some performance will happen on stage as well as on screen. It won’t be boring. It will be the opposite of boring.
Sweet Bird andsoforth runs from the 17th of August to the 10th of September at Studio 1. After the performance on 22 August, a free forum discussion between writer Laura Naumann and translator Ben Winspear will take place. After the performance on 23 August, a free Q&A with the cast and Laura Naumann will be held.
