{"id":496,"date":"2022-06-10T17:31:17","date_gmt":"2022-06-10T17:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/25\/?p=496"},"modified":"2026-06-19T07:04:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T07:04:41","slug":"facing-the-fire-australian-people-places-and-crises-in-the-works-of-campion-decent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/25\/facing-the-fire-australian-people-places-and-crises-in-the-works-of-campion-decent\/","title":{"rendered":"Facing the Fire: Australian People, Places, and Crises in the Works of Campion Decent"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Carla Rocavert<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Black Saturday, Ash Wednesday, Black Tuesday, Black Friday, Black Thursday, Red Tuesday. As multi-award-winning playwright Campion Decent notes, these terms are \u201cblistered\u201d into Australians\u2019 collective consciousness. Long celebrated for bringing \u201cgutsy, dry-witted yarns\u201d (Hallett and Sykes) to the stage, Decent\u2019s verbatim works inform discourses on crisis, ecology and identity. In addition to his 2006 HotHouse Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company play Embers, a dissection of the \u201cmonster blaze\u201d that \u201cripped through\u201d (Peard) the Australian state of Victoria in 2003, Decent\u2019s work also includes The Campaign (2018), a reflection on the \u201cvenomous\u201d politics and \u201cindividual acts of bravery\u201d (Seymour Centre) that shaped the fight for Gay Law Reform in Tasmania (the original home of Green politics, Milne). As he prepares his latest play, a scrupulous history of bushfire \u201cthrough the lens of 2019\u201320\u2019s \u2018Black Summer,\u2019\u201d Decent shares his reflections on the agency of theatre-makers as they encounter emergency, devastation, and psychological and social trauma. Drawing on broader research on ecocritical theatre, the politics of performance, and environmental crisis, this article provides a case study of how a \u201cclimate of attention\u201d (Christopher and Grodin) is being stirred in Australia. A special focus will be textual and structural approaches to verbatim writing, and specifically Decent\u2019s successful engagement with ordinary citizens and diverse audiences, many of whom, to quote Vicky Angelaki, teeter \u201cbetween improvement or decline, catastrophe or salvation\u201d (2). As a leading Australian playwright, Decent both disturbs and affectively invites audiences to consider the nation\u2019s true stories of crisis, rendering them active and collective agents in the struggle against social and political dysfunction.

Keywords: <\/strong>Theatre, verbatim, ecology, crisis, Australia, campaign<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In two regions of Australia, at two different moments in recent history, communities came together to face a crisis. One was a \u201cmonster blaze\u201d (Peard) that roared through the Victorian bushland and devastated homes, livestock, wildlife, farmland and almost everything else in its wake. The other was a concerted push to decriminalize sexual activity between consenting adult males in the state of Tasmania. The Victorian fires of 2003 lasted 59 days, \u201cburnt 1.1 million hectares of public and private land, destroyed 9,000 livestock, 41 houses, 3,000 kilometers of fencing, and innumerable manmade and natural assets\u201d (Decent, Embers<\/em> 20). As late as the mid-1990s, the Tasmanian Criminal Code held that homosexuality was \u201cpunishable with up to 21 years imprisonment\u201d (Decent, The Campaign<\/em> 14). Gay Law Reform had passed elsewhere in Australia during the 1970s and 80s (\u201cTimeline: 22 Years\u201d), in England in 1967 (Schraer and D’Urso), and in certain states of America in 1962 (PBS American Experience). Inspired by world-leading environmental activism in Tasmania, more than 90 individuals submitted to 130 arrests that led them to the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations and, eventually, to the High Court of Australia. As the ABC<\/em> reports, \u201cTasmania’s Upper House finally passed gay law reform by one vote. It came into effect on May 13, 1997\u201d (\u201cTimeline: 22 Years\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Playwright Campion Decent tells the stories of the Victorian fires and the fight for Gay Law Reform in two independent verbatim plays: Embers<\/em> (2006) and The Campaign<\/em> (2018). Embers<\/em> premiered at HotHouse Theatre in Albury-Wodonga before transferring to the Sydney Theatre Company and touring nationally. The Campaign<\/em> premiered at Salamanca Arts Centre in Tasmania and was later staged in Melbourne and Sydney. Decent is a leading figure in the Australian LGBTQIA+ movement[1]<\/sup><\/a> and performing arts, whose plays examine what \u201cglues\u201d people together in times of crisis. Having been Artistic Director of HotHouse Theatre, Literary Manager at Sydney Theatre Company, and Chair of the Australian National Playwrights\u2019 Centre, he has also won numerous awards, including an AWGIE and the Queensland Premier\u2019s Literary Award for Embers <\/em>and the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award for Unholy Ghosts<\/em> (a tragicomedy about the \u201cundignified death\u201d of parents). Decent\u2019s work has been praised as \u201cstirring,\u201d \u201ccharacter-rich\u201d (Hallett), and an example of the \u201cbroader benefits\u201d of airing stories to \u201cheal trauma\u201d (Reich).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Playwright Campion Decent. Photo: Campion Decent<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

This article includes an interview with Decent, who is currently preparing a new verbatim work on the 2019\u201320 bushfires in Australia, known as Black Summer. Titled Unprecedented<\/em>, the play rages at the fault lines in Australia\u2019s response to a devastating new scale of environmental disaster, which \u201cburnt 19 million hectares,\u201d \u201ckilled or displaced\u201d \u201cthree billion\u201d animals and \u201cadded 900 million tonnes to the nation\u2019s annual greenhouse-gas emissions\u201d (Decent Unprecedented<\/em>). Decent shares insights on writing crisis in the Australian context, aesthetic concerns and audience engagement, the significance of \u201cplace\u201d in his verbatim theatre, local and global impacts, and theatre\u2019s role in fighting for a future. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Photo by Philips, Getty images.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

A growing body of international theatre work addresses late twentieth- and earth twenty-first-century ecological crises, as well as \u201ccrises of identity and relationship\u201d (May 12). Vicky Angelaki observes that \u201ccrisis has been a recurring term in the post-2000 period,\u201d closely connected to political, financial, and environmental contexts (1), and ensuing \u201csocial and political emergencies and dysfunctions\u201d under neoliberalism (4). At their \u201cgrassroots,\u201d as Downing Cless writes, ecological plays \u201crun the spectrum from particular to universal . . . [and] have a firm basis in community, either a particular place or groupings of people\u201d (80). The people of Embers<\/em> and The Campaign<\/em>, who fought against fire or fought for their rights to equality and dignity, shared \u201cfervent\u201d hopes and \u201curgent\u201d goals (Cless 100). Teetering, as Angelaki describes, \u201cbetween improvement or decline, catastrophe or salvation\u201d (2), the participants\u2019 voices coalesce in theatrical form to offer dialogue not only on \u201cthe social conditions of marginalized groups\u201d but \u201cecological basics\u201d and the impact of manmade disaster \u201con the land and the family\u201d (May 89\u201390).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Decent\u2019s renderings also convey a \u201cfelt attachment\u201d (Malpas In the Brightness<\/em> 37) to the rural and geographically isolated landscapes of Victoria and Tasmania. As places of both \u201castonishing\u201d (Decent, Personal interview) beauty and an eerie pastoral darkness (Malpas \u201cSpirits of Place\u201d), they provide a \u201cground and framework for thinking\u201d (Malpas In the Brightness<\/em> 1). From these places comes a \u201cpatterning\u201d (Decent, Personal interview) of spoken images and theatrical beats which enable an \u201cecocritical purchase,\u201d to borrow from Carl Lavery, inviting an \u201caffecting of bodies; both individually and collectively\u201d (Lavery 3).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Archival photo of Rodney Croome\u2019s arrest in Tasmania, 1988. Photo: Courtesy of Roger Lovell<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Decent drew inspiration from verbatim works including \u201cAftershocks <\/em>by Paul Brown and the Workers’ Cultural Action Committee about the Newcastle earthquake of 1989\u201d and \u201cMoises Kaufman\u2019s The Laramie Project<\/em>, about the brutal killing of a gay man in Wyoming\u201d (Embers <\/em>6). A \u201ctype of performance based on actual words spoken by \u2018real people\u2019\u201d (Garson 4) and \u201ctranscribed,\u201d \u201cedited or recontextualised by a dramatist\u201d (Norton-Taylor 9), verbatim theatre has expanded considerably since the 1990s (Garson 4) and is sometimes thought of as a blend of documentary\/journalism and theatre (Bernbaum 201; Norton-Taylor 10, 62\u201363, 101). \u201cMuch has been written,\u201d as Emma Cox notes, \u201con verbatim theatre\u2019s peculiar predicament as a mode of representation\u201d (32). In her analysis of Ros Horin\u2019s Through the Wire <\/em>(2004\u201305), about Australian asylum seekers, Cox warns that verbatim plays can become \u201centangled with aesthetic concerns\u201d in ways that complicate truth\/truthfulness\u2014especially when works \u201cstructure\u201d or \u201cposition\u201d audience responses (31).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stephen J. Bottoms\u2019s well-known critique of David Hare\u2019s The Permanent Way<\/em> (2003) and Stuff Happens<\/em> (2004),[2]<\/sup><\/a> and Robin Soan\u2019s Talking to Terrorists<\/em> (2005) urges for a \u201cself-conscious emphasis on the vicissitudes of textuality and discourse,\u201d and an acknowledgement of \u201chighly selective manipulation of opinion and rhetoric\u201d (57\u201358). However, writers such as Caroline Wake note that \u201cverbatim theatre has ties to some of the west\u2019s oldest theatrical traditions\u201d (71) and can be especially successful in conjuring \u201ca locality and authenticity through its strong sense of place\u201d (113). Sculpted through the \u201chard work\u201d of the dramatist, as Richard Norton-Taylor argues, verbatim plays are held to account on their promise not to \u201cmisrepresent\u201d (10). Though they will always convey (like all informational texts) an inherent bias, the use of real voices is ultimately a \u201ctechnique\u201d or \u201cmethod\u201d (10) used to varying degrees in all drama (Norton-Taylor 10).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vinson Cunningham recently praised the powerfulness of \u201ccompressing hundreds of hours of interviews\u201d about \u201chigh-profile civic events\u201d into what he calls \u201ca chorus of sensibilities, curated into a higher coherence.\u201d Speaking of Anna Deavere Smith\u2019s work on the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Cunningham sees verbatim work as being capable of inviting audiences \u201cinto a more complete understanding of themselves.\u201d Decent explains that it\u2019s about finding \u201cthe fulcrum in the story\u201d (Personal interview). In The Campaign<\/em> for example, he dramatizes \u201ckey turning points over the nine-year period of the campaign, not the entire campaign.\u201d \u201cFlashpoints\u201d highlighted in Embers<\/em> and Unprecedented<\/em>, are similarly chosen to \u201copen up a broader discussion on environment, land management, and climate change\u201d (Decent, Personal interview).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the conversation below, Decent elucidates how he purposefully draws attention to the artificiality of representation<\/em> through specific devices and diegetic techniques, the use of which does not prevent audiences from sharing in a presentation of \u201cindividual truths\u201d (Decent, Personal interview). \u201cRevelatory\u201d and deeply moving stagings of Embers<\/em> have seen those who personally lived through the horror of the fires yelling out during performances: \u201cThat\u2019s right!\u201d and \u201cToo true!\u201d (Reich). As Kath Melbourne wrote of Decent\u2019s The Campaign<\/em> when it opened in Tasmania, \u201cAt the end of the play the audience rose in unison . . . you could see the tears streaming down faces, and smiles breaking through them as we applauded the cast, director, writer\u2014and importantly those in the audience who were the inspiration for the work.\u201d The Campaign<\/em> premiered less than a year after marriage equality had passed in Australia. Debates around teaching gender diversity in Australian educational institutions were also at their \u201cboiling point\u201d (Decent, Personal interview).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Embers <\/em>by Campion Decent AIM Dramatic Arts (2013). Directed by Luke Rogers. Photo: Heidrun L\u00f6hr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Embers<\/em> and The Campaign<\/em> are very much grassroots productions, whose stories sit in conversation with international dialogues of activism and ecological response. Decent\u2019s writing is part of an Australian \u201ceco-canon\u201d (Jacobson qtd. in Cless 79) which includes (among many others) Griffith University\u2019s 2015 \u201ceco-critical exploration of the Australian landscape\u201d in Dust <\/em>(Hassall 272) and indigenous dance-theatre company Marrugeku\u2019s Cut the Sky<\/em> (Murphy-Oates). His depictions of \u201chope and loss\u201d and care for \u201cnon-human inhabitants\u201d (New Play Exchange) also connect with dissections of ecology and identity beyond the continent, such as the 2022 Ecodrama Playwrights Festival award winner Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying<\/em>, by Jessica Huang.[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Embers<\/em> and The Campaign<\/em> furthermore inform a history of ecology\/activism plays, such as those about logging by Seattle Public Theatre and California\u2019s Ukiah Players Theatre (in the 1990s; Cless 80) and Kalamu ya Salaam\u2019s The Breath of Life<\/em> (1993), about the poisoning of air and water at a petrochemical plant (Cless 92\u201393). As Decent\u2019s comments indicate, Embers<\/em> and The Campaign<\/em> frame dialectical discussions \u201cwith the world outside the theatre\u201d (Garson 46) and inspire ongoing reflection on the interplay and perceptual mirroring between the natural environment and human triumph and tragedy. Most importantly, they \u201cdefine and expand the sense of community and collective imagination, ethics, responsibility, empathy, and action needed\u201d (Ahmadi 5), from the perspective of \u201cone of the countries most vulnerable to climate change in the developed world\u201d (Latimer).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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