Lost In Communication

The life cycle of an MX, the daily commuter publication on City Rail trains, is an interesting one: read only by people going somewhere, it goes nowhere. You needn't even pick one up from someone handing them out, as one collected by a commuter in Cronulla, or Hornsby, or Padstow, will be left on a seat and eventually found by another, or thrown in station bins.

Tahli Corin collects them. Well, she did. Rather than this being a worrying early sign of hording tendencies, it's better to focus on the positives: her latest play, Girl In Tan Boots, inspired by the paper's Here's Looking At You section.

“I guess I'd been collecting MX magazine for, well, probably two or three years,” explains Corin, the fragment eerily reminiscent of an introduction at a Hoarders Anonymous meeting before what follows: “Polly Rowe, the literary manager at STC, invited a couple of playwrights to come in and spend some time with STC Residents and work with them. So, right from the word go I was working with some fantastic actors. So I had this huge pile of magazines and I went into the rehearsal room and was basically like, 'Here, I think there's something I want to investigate here.'”

This early development, and the subsequent Rough Draft presentation at Sydney Theatre Company, revealed the rewards of that investigation as Corin honed the show alongside director Susanna Dowling into the mystery and musing on disappearance – both literal and metaphorical – that it would become.

“That first point of investigation was how curious I found it why people would see someone that was maybe sitting three seats away and would pick up their phone and text in,” Corin observes of the anonymous coffee requests in the paper. “There was that loss of communication, or I guess evolution of communication, that was very, very public. We went through and traced these stories of people who had sent messages and got responses and then there was more messages, we found a heap of characters, some of who still exist in the play, and then the Rough Draft came out of that. With that first development I knew I was dealing with a mystery, and that someone was going to go missing, and of course when that happens you then need a detective, so the Rough Draft brought in the detective character.”

What came through the mystery was the musing on disappearance (and the enticing inclusion of a magic consultant on the creative team), and with that the central question, a sort of bleak existential contemporary equivalent of the falling tree conundrum; are you really missing if no one is looking for you?

“There's two things at play,” Corin explains, “there is very much the real disappearance of Hannah, but there is also very much that metaphorical disappearance of feeling isolated or invisible in a big city. The texts are somewhat related to that in a sense, in what used to be private exclamations of love or affection have become public; people in a huge city somehow want to be seen in these most intimate of acts.”