Parties or babies?

Are we becoming a society of freewheeling, guiltless party animals, content to stave off inevitable adult maturity for as long as we can? Do we have to be married by the time we’ve hit the big 3 – 0, be burdened by a massive mortgage with a crippling interest rate, children, a full-time job, and relinquish our teenage fantasies? Playwright Tommy Murphy is asking these same questions, and channelling his inquisitiveness into a new theatre production, Saturn’s Return.

By Dom Alessio

The play revolves around a couple staring point-blank at the looming shadows of adult responsibility – babies, houses, marriage – and turning 30. It’s a production that flitters in and out of reality, as the two central characters draw out the ghosts of people from their past and travel to different locales and periods of time, trying to decide whether maturity is more fulfilling than adolescent freedom.

The impetus for their fantastical investigation is motivated by the female lead’s fertility anxiety, and the questions she’s asking herself about whether she should have a baby now, and whether she should have it with her partner. And if you’re wondering why she doesn’t have a name, that’s because she doesn’t have one… yet. “It’s just this thing,” Murphy sighs. “I always sort of stress over it, but it feels like you don’t really know the characters until you find a name that really sticks, so her name changes almost daily at the moment.”

Murphy first wrote a draft of the play where the characters were turning 40, rather than 30. “I realised no, there is something very particular about facing 30 and something very particular about it right now, and so it was that end of a prolonged adolescence and responsibility knocking that I wanted to write about. And hopefully also to write in a voice that I have quite a bit of authority on, being, you know, my age,” he adds with a laugh.

Read the full story in Corker Issue 2: Winter 2008

Saturn’s Return plays as part of the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2LOUD program at Wharf 2, Walsh Bay from August 15, 2008. For more information, check out www.sydneytheatre.com.au.