The Shiralee: D'Arcy Niland's 1955 Australian western

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. I'm Mark Burtman and for the documentary from the BBC World Service, we're travelling deep into the outback and the first ever staging of a classic Australian novel, The Shira Lee by Darcy Nyland. Act 1, Scene 1. New South Wales, 1955. A vast expanse of planes, dust and spinifex. From the distance appears a man alone. He gets closer and closer as he walks along a seemingly endless dirt road. He is Macaulay, a man of 35, built like a cenotaph. He had ridges on his forehead like a row of sleepers, a brassy look and a wide hat that put evening on his face while the rest of him was in sunshine.

1:18His hands were huge. Taking the Shirley from page to stage is the multi-talented writer and actor Kate Mulvaney. she's been documenting her creative process for In The Studio. I'm at about draft four and I've been working on it for about 18 months. The really annoying thing about the book is it's a chapterless book. To turn that into a play is actually really tricky. It's not like you can go and seen because there are none. It's just this continuous on the road. Author Darcy Nyland took the rough-hewn lives of Australia's itinerant swagmen, or Swaggies, who tramped the baking vastness of the outback from Dimboola to Dubbo to sheer, slaughter, drink and fight, and he wove a darkly moving road story of Macaulay, a Swaggie full of rage and bitterness, bound for everywhere and nowhere, and alongside him, dragged, cajoled and resented, is his Shirely, his burden.

2:17Four-year-old daughter Buster, whisked away from a slum home in Sydney's King's Cross to spite his wife Marge. Filmed in the 1950s and adapted for television in the 1980s, it remains a classic, but one that Mulvaney's intent on reimagining for modern sensibilities. The book is from 1955, so it has dated in some ways. It's from Mac's point of view, and to be honest, that's got me shaking in my boots a little bit because Mac really scares me as a character, as does his wife Marge. They're both really wounded birds. And then they've got this daughter, Buster, who I also really want to do justice to, especially in the world that they're in and that we're in right now.

3:00I want to switch it around a little, make it about what Mac learns from Buster, not just what Buster learns from Mac, what they all learn from each other, these characters. I really want to write a play for a little girl who is walking in a toxic world. and this family of theirs, they have inherited generational trauma and I know something about that.

3:28Most of my plays deal with children. I can't have children and I was asked recently if that's why and I kind of went, well, maybe it is. Maybe it's a way of having children live from your mind and heart and soul in another way. I grew up in country Western Australia. My dad was a road builder. He was from Nottingham, but he came out as a 10 pound pom. Then he was conscripted to Vietnam. Just before he went to Vietnam, he got a job on the roads, going out bush, as we call it in Australia. Even though we lived in the country, he'd go further into the country. Often I'd accompany him as a little girl.

4:03I was recovering from Agent Orange related cancer from his service in Vietnam. I think he had this compulsion to sort of take me out with him while he was struggling with his own sense of self and worth and guilt and love. Cut to many years later, and I become one of the main adapters in Australia of Ruth Park's work. Ruth Park is a brilliant Australian author, and she was an iconic feminist in the 1950s. I thought, you know what, I'd really like to do The Shira Lee, which is written by her husband, Darcy Nyland. Kip Williams, who's the artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, was leaving the STC.

4:35He usually directs and commissions my work. I said to him, how about we bookend your tenure and my writing with the Shira Lee? And he went for it. So here we are.

4:51All right, so I have written some semblance, I guess, of a first draft. The Shira Lee novel is utterly brutal. I really, really struggle with the character of Macaulay. I find him toxic, but I think that's the point and that's the genius of the book. I have a really, really specific person in mind for the role of Macaulay, Josh McConville, without doubt Australia's greatest stage actor. Josh is one of those actors that even when he's playing the most toxic of characters, and he plays toxic characters, you can't help but fall for him in some way. He taps a very, very vulnerable vein and I can't not see Josh as Macaulay.

5:38I don't know where we're going to get our Buster. This little girl who in the book, I didn't realise in the book Buster is four. That throws a spanner in the works because I really can't be putting a four-year-old on stage and making them learn lines. Also, we'd have to double and I also can't put an adult on stage playing a four-year-old because I think that's just a little bit of a bridge too far. Oh, it's hard. It is delicious though.

6:10Okay, we're about to go into the first read ever out loud by actors at the Sydney Theatre Company. It's a beautiful day and I'm currently sitting having a quick coffee underneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge at the Sydney Theatre Company, which I think is probably the most beautiful theatre company in the entire world and it always just leaves me gobsmacked when I get to work here but I'm about to go in and meet the cast many of whom I know already but many of whom I don't which is really cool my favourite part of the job getting to know new artists and hearing their voices and their ideas we had them for the briefest amount of time because funding you know which doesn't leave us much time to read what I think is going to be a two and a half hour play anyway we have as our cast, Macaulay, is Ewan Leslie, an old friend of mine from Western Australia, so I know that he'll know this terrain really, really well.

7:04As Buster, we have Ziggy Resnick, whose work I don't know, but apparently they are incredible. Even though Ziggy will be playing a child, I think they're in their 20s, and they are a trained clown, which I think might work beautifully, I don't know, to get that childlike energy. You can make anything happen on a stage, I truly believe that. So even though we probably need twice the cast we have, we're going to make this work, I hope. I really hope they like it. The other thing about this play is that I'm using bush poetry in it because Buster decides that she wants to be a poet while she's on the road.

7:42You know, she can't. She can hardly read. Her father can't read at all. Here they are, these two illiterate itinerants, one of whom wants to run as far away from his miseducation as possible and the other one who is desperate to become a poet. Buster has more power in this play than she will ever know and that's, I think, the bittersweet thing about her.

8:13Okay, first read. I didn't record it because I totally forgot to, But I'm glad that we didn't because this script is not ready to be recorded out loud. It's not ready to be heard yet. It needs edits. It needs voices to ring louder, tightening and heightening, and it needs other voices to get the hell out of there, get off the page. It needs to put its characters in more danger, a more immediate danger. It needs to get darker faster and it needs a light at the end of it. But I tell you what, I think we've found our buster. I'm almost 100 % sure of it. Ziggy Resnick, who was hired for the read, all of these actors were hired just for the read.

8:59There was no promise of them going on to the full production. Ziggy Resnick is an actor in their 20s, but it was a 10-year-old girl that sat down at the table today and blew our minds. Ziggy, tell us about Buster McCauley. Do you want me to tell you about the story? Yeah. Like what happens? Yeah. Well, she wakes up and she's not at home in King's Cross anymore. Why? Because her dad has come and now she slowly comes to realise that she is on an adventure with her dad. She's rarely seen before and it's a scary and big and vast adventure and she leaves the lights and the claustrophobia of King's Cross and is landed in the wide open space of the Australian country a place she's never been before and she meets all these people that she's never seen before Swaggies, people that live and walk on the land and over the course of a month it just so happens that she is lifted out of King's Cross and into the country and then in doing so really changes the course of her life Ziggy understood the pathos, understood the humour understood the danger, understood the voice and the energy of Buster as a character and to know that now I can start the process of writing for Ziggy and I'm writing for Josh McConville as Mac.

10:26I've got to stop talking. I've got to start writing. I've got to eat my pizza. What fun. Mulvaney has enough on her hands with adapting a work that resonates so fiercely with her. But then another door opens. So I've just had a very beautiful phone call from Kip Williams, the outgoing Sydney Theatre Company artistic director, who has very kindly, as one of his final gestures, offered me the role of Marge in the Shirely. I feel so honoured but so torn. I'm very scared. Marge is one of those female voices that I really want to do justice to because I don't feel like she gets her say in the way she should have her say in the book or in the adaptations of the book.

11:15She comes across as a very vengeful, crazy, wild-eyed bitch, you know, a real trope of the times. But I'm not interested in that as a writer. I'm interested in honouring her circumstances. She is a single mum, pretty much, whose husband goes away for months and months on end, leaving her at home in a slum of Sydney with a little girl that she can't afford to educate. She has to sell her own body in order to make ends meet. She becomes addicted to drugs and alcohol. and then Mac waltzes in one night, finds her in bed with her lover and steals their daughter. She, I think, has every right to be furious and scared and vulnerable.

12:08But it's one thing to write for that character and yet another to step into her shoes. I want to do her justice on both fronts and I've written 35 plays and only performed in them twice. Once was autobiographical, so that kind of made sense. However, I find it really hard to be on stage in my own work because you're constantly second-guessing yourself in each role. It's also very antisocial because you've got to go home after every rehearsal and do rewrites. But the biggest thing that is making me scared is the fact that even though I've worked as a writer at the Sydney Theatre Company for many years, I haven't worked there as an actor for 16 years.

12:51There's a very personal reason why Kate didn't act for the Sydney Theatre Company for many years, a reason that some listeners might find distressing. I used to do about two plays a year at the STC, but the last one, I lost my beautiful partner Mark. Just before we opened, Mark took his own life. He had a terrible mental illness and we lost him. I just couldn't and didn't go back on stage. I left stage for three years. and I never went back to the Sydney Theatre Company as an actor. So to get this phone call from Kip to say, please play this character in your play, it was such a surprise but also has filled me with butterflies, but quite joyous butterflies, I have to say.

13:38And even just talking this out, I'm going, I think I can do it. Maybe it's time to say yes to coming back to the Sydney Theatre Company stage. As Marge, a woman who I've been desperate to give a voice to on the page, So let's move it to the stage.

14:21Make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. This is the BBC World Service documentary in the studio.

14:39So it's about getting close to eight o 'clock in the morning on our first day of rehearsals. This is the first step of letting it go after being with this play for so long and being with this story for so many years in my head that I actually get to share it and hear it out loud. Eww! Chookers, as we say in Australia. Chookers for the first day.

15:18I was wondering if I was. Yeah, someone take the kid, take the kid. Make it good, Christy.

15:31No more.

15:36Well, I'm back. 13 hours after I left the house and the ocean outside is now dark and quiet and it's still. I'm glad it's still. I kind of need some stillness. Today was extraordinary. There's nothing more confronting than walking into a rehearsal room and realising how many people are working on your play. And unlike a film and TV set where you can, I guess, at least as a performer and even as a writer, find moments of respite and rest and a lull in the theatre a rehearsal room it's just go go go the entire time especially on first day but led by our incredible director Jess Arthur the day was just joyous everyone turned up with their jigsaw piece and we're going to turn this puzzle into a picture

16:38we're two weeks into rehearsal it's such an energized and fun and utterly bonkers group of people it's very much an ensemble piece which means that actors whether or not they're in a scene kind of have to stay in the room to create ambience or to be extras in the background or to even shift the scenery. A lot of the first couple of weeks have been really us having song rehearsals with our wonderful musical director, Vicky Falconer. And that's been really tricky to find the right songs. We're sitting in the years 1945 to 1955 in the Shirely and that's pre-Elvis, Buddy Holly and that sort of era.

17:21But in Australia, there weren't many female singers. I've had to lean into really, really unknown singers from Australia that for some reason are not on our radar, have never been on our radar. One in particular, Shirley Toms, a teenage yodeler. And she took the genre of the yodel along with all of the American style singing about coyotes and planes and things like that. but she was from country Australia and I've fallen upon this amazing library of songs from her.

18:02The soundscape for me is going to be fascinating. I mean these guys go to whoop whoop and whoop whoop means in Australia just the middle of nowhere and so the trees have to change. Australia is massive and they're going to be going from a subtropical suburb to the absolute desert in this show. It's got to be the silence. The silence is deafening. The nothingness. And then of course if you are lucky enough to get a storm and there is a storm in this play. It's the sizzle of the rain hitting the road but also that petrichor smell that fills the senses. But They're going out even further, Buster and Mac.

18:42They're sleeping with scorpions and snakes. There's that sound as well. And the way a voice carries in the emptiness. That's an amazing thing, how it can sound so tiny amidst the vastness, but also if you call out, a famous Australian call is, and that was the way that people would call out to each other. People still do call out to each other on these massive stations that Australia is made of. It's a huge country. There's the sound of ghosts. Mac is being very much haunted by a ghost. He's getting followed, but he doesn't know what he's being followed by. That was one of my main things as the playwright too, was going, what is he getting haunted by?

19:23Someone who knows full well that they are walking on stolen land and that country has more in store for them than they're prepared for because they haven't necessarily made peace with their place there. And Mac is certainly that. He's getting chased by something. It is his past, it is his legacy, it is his history, it is Buster, but it's also his place as a white man on this land. So we're about to head into week three. Week three is always the week that it gets a bit scary. We've only blocked the first act. These scenes are a lot bigger than I realise. We start the show with an enormous fistfight between Mac and a local called Goliath.

20:08And it's brutal. And Tim Dashwood, our fight coordinator, he's really going there with Josh and with Stephen. And, I mean, they can hardly walk at the moment. They're so exhausted. So we've got to take care of our boys, our fighters. But woof, what a way to start the show with an enormous country dirt ring fight. Very, very masculine. And then when a little girl enters that realm, you can really feel where this show is going. Stay away from my dad! Someone take the kid! Macaulay gets into a lot of fights on his way across Australia with his daughter Buster. You're not marrying my wife, you Larry Rat.

20:51They're pretty volatile fights that we've worked really hard on so it's very important that what Buster sees on the road is particularly toxic so that she develops a fear of her father. Mac! Stop! I'd love to talk a little bit about Jeremy Allen, who is our set and costume designer. Because the outback of Australia changes so significantly from sunrise to sunset, from patch to patch, it's a really difficult job to go, what is the Australian outback? What is the bush? What Jeremy's done, which I think is genius, is he has taken inspiration from shearing sheds, which are often found in these outback towns.

21:32and he's taken the floor of those shearing sheds, which are always wooden boards, rough hewn, and he's curled a floor of wooden boards into a sort of wave. It's like a crest and it could be a mountain. It could be a hill. It could be a cloud. It could be a cliff. It's this ever lurking presence that shifts between being a very malevolent presence and a really uplifting presence. The only other set pieces really are things that get rolled on and rolled off, like ghost gums, beautiful, tall, white, trunked, often with peeling bark and very prolific in Outback Australia. They often glow in the dark, which is, I guess, why they're called ghost gums.

22:15and he's got built into the set campfires. So when we open up segments of the set, there are actual working fires in there that we light and there you go, we have a campfire.

22:33I don't even know where week five went. We are in a bare space and ready to move into the Sydney Opera House. We actually had quite a few actors go down with a very bad cold that really put a spanner in the works simply because we couldn't do things like intimacy scenes that needed to be really honed until now. The fight scenes are poor, poor fighters. Josh McComble and Stephen Anderson and Aaron Pedersen, all three of them had bad head colds. So it was like the limpest, palest little boxes you ever did see. In Australia, we don't have understudies. They're simply not the money for understudies.

23:15That's why we think it's quite lucky that everyone got sick in rehearsals. Can we please have Josh McConville and Stephen Anderson and Jess Arthur to the stage please? Josh McConville, Stephen Anderson and Jess Arthur to the stage. Thank you. Just as the previews beckoned, so did potential disaster. On Monday night we were all amped to do our first preview. Our beautiful lead Josh McConville injured himself quite badly. We had to cancel the next two previews and what we did while Josh was recuperating and getting all the details about just how badly he was injured was we got another fabulous actor named Damien Struthos to step into the role with two days rehearsal, not even, kind of a day and a half, and go on stage as Macaulay.

24:03Macaulay does not leave the stage. To not have someone play Macaulay was something that we had to deal with. He went on, he had an ear wig in, the device that's used to feed lines. The artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company stepped into the box and delivered the lines quietly to Damien, who then did the entire show, including the fights, including the love scenes. He got a standing ovation from our amazing preview crowd. It was only our second preview and Josh is back. It's raring to go. He is taped up. He's doing the fights. We've got a lot of work to do. And then we'll welcome in our audience.

24:44Tonight we open. So let's take it from there. There was a man who had a cross. And his name was Macaulay. He put a strainer at his feet the only way he knew how. His boots spun the dust from its roads. And his body weighted its streams.

25:07And it was good. From opening night in early October until final curtain at the end of this month, multi-generational audiences have been drawn to this old classic, transformed for our times. The reviews have been glowing. I think the Shiralees road is just beginning. This has been In The Studio with me, Mark Berman, and writer-performer Kate Mulvaney and members of the Sydney Theatre Company. Additional reporting from Regina Bottras. You can download further explorations of creative brilliance from the BBC World Service documentary website.

26:00every week for my show, Merrin Talks Money from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists, and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.