Tell me a bit about your background – how did you get into theatre?
I grew up in Killara in Sydney. I was working in management consultancy, and started doing evening classes at Darlinghurst Theatre Company when I was about 23 (1995). I had always wanted to do something in the artistic realm but it was always a question of how – I didn’t really know how to approach it. But once I started these classes I loved it, and moved to Melbourne in 1998 to go to VCA.

I decided to stay based in Melbourne after I graduated (2000) – there’s a great independent theatre scene here, as well as the main stages,  and there’s a real sense of community around VCA which I didn’t want to leave.

You trained as an actor – how did the writing bit come about?
I had written little monologues at VCA, but I think what really sparked my interest was working (as an actor) with writers doing developments for new works. When you perform in a new play the writing is still in process – so I’ve seen how things change and how they evolve – how a piece is crafted and develops dramaturgically and I’ve learnt a lot from that.

The Harry Harlow Project is the first work I’ve written, and I certainly don’t consider myself to now be a playwright! I wrote it because I was really interested in the subject matter.  I was aware of his experiments – somehow – and saw a documentary about him. I was drawn to his personal life and the ethical issues around his work – I grew up in a medical family and I knew I didn’t want to become a scientist, but I was intrigued by these issues.  So with writing, I guess it’s the way you get your own projects up. If you’ve got an idea in your head and you want to make it real, you have to write it down.

Form and content are intrinsically related in this piece – was that always your vision?
I knew I wanted to approach the work with more of an installation/visual style – I wasn’t interested in making a traditional ‘biopic’ – the nature of Harry Harlow’s life and personality meant I knew we had to explore the fragments of his psyche somehow – the different ‘sides’ to him in the various aspects of his life.

I asked Brian Lipson to direct the piece because this is the style of work he makes – I’ve worked with him as an actor. I knew he was the best person to try and frame it, given it doesn’t have a traditional arc. We follow this person through 6 or 7 different lenses – obviously it had to hold together as a whole but we wanted the audience to not feel too comfortable in their judgement – to feel that the ‘truth’ is too murky and messy to come to an easy conclusion.  Brian works with this in the design – the proximity of the audience to Harry, the lighting – it makes you constantly question what you’re watching. And as a team we were interested in theatrically pushing the form as much as possible – we wanted to be experimental in that.

So what was the process – from researching the subject matter to being in the rehearsal room?
With the process of applying for funding it was probably a three year journey all up. I spent a good year researching and writing – I got all his scientific papers, I got in contact with his biographer, Deborah Blum (who features as a character in the piece), read the commentary on him, psychology papers – basically filled my head to the brim until I was ready to explode and then I started writing, almost in a stream of consciousness, in the different ‘characters’ we see in the work. I brought what I’d written into the creative development. Brian would say, ‘that’s interesting to me’ so we’d develop that bit, working with different characters, in different tenses, moving bits around. Once we were in the creative development the piece was devised by the four of us – myself, Brian, Kelly Ryall (Sound Design) and Martyn Coutts (Video design). It also progressed quite quickly from this point. We had a showing at the end of the creative development and the general response was that people did find it fascinating.

What was it like performing in a solo show that you had also written?
Terrifying! You’ve taken on so much you really don’t want to stuff it up. It was rewarding to create the piece collaboratively in the way we had and also very challenging – so by the time I had performed it the first few times I actually started to relax – once it was locked down and it’d had a few runs.

Was it challenging playing essentially multiple characters?
Internally it made perfect sense that he would switch characters/character types, so the changes in performance styles didn’t seem too difficult. I’ll be interested when we start this tour and rehearse it again what it feels like – now that I’m much more in the role of performer. Is it still there? It’s a part of me – but the ‘script’ is still a bunch of loose bits of paper that I’ll have to go back to and try and decipher…

You conclude that Harry Harlow’s treatment of his monkeys was driven by his need to understand his own psychological distress – is that a commonly held view?
I don’t think you could read his biography and research his life without coming to that kind of conclusion – he was an alcoholic, he had a difficult relationship with his children, he was clinically depressed. But it was this need to try and understand the decisions he made that informed the overall structure of the work – that we, the audience, are inside his head. We are ‘with’ him as he tries to grapples with his life and understand who and what he is. And, it becomes clear towards the end that he is inside his own Pit of Despair.

I like the way this approach allowed us to always see his life from his point of view through whatever lens we’re looking through in that scene – rather than having the other characters on stage with him. This is what gives the us the general sense of unease, that keeps the audience uncomfortable – we’re trapped with him – there’s no escape.

What are you working on currently?
I’m working on a film version with a friend of mine who’s a film director in Berlin – that’s a whole other process to get my head around and a huge learning curve. I’m also writing another theatre piece. The more I do it the more I love it. And of course I’m acting as well in between.