Drive You Crazy

A graduate of the National Theatre for Drama in St Kilda and NIDA's directors' course, and a regular face on stage and screen, in 2010 John Sheedy added another string to his bow with his appointment as the Artistic Director of West Australian youth theatre company, Barking Gecko. In his bid to land the job, Sheedy was required to put together a mock season for the company, and the success of one of those proposals in particular has certainly proved him to be the right man for the job.

“I thought, well if I'm running a youth theatre company presenting theatre for children and young people in WA, then why not get to know the young people of WA and do a show written by them, as it is verbatim theatre, and for them?”

The result was Driving Into Walls. Sheedy employed the assistance of writer Suzie Miller and got to work compiling the more than 500 interviews with WA youth that would inform the show.

“It was a big road trip that we went on over several weeks to do workshops with teenagers in schools and in skate parks and in youth centres, and we'd try and cover as much as we could from as many demographics and different cultures as we could,” Sheedy explains.

Through a series of 50 set questions – everything from 'Have you been bullied?' to 'What's your favourite ice cream flavour?' – group discussion and a private confessional video, Sheedy and Miller compiled the material for their show, “So there were some mundane, funny little facts to some really hard-hitting questions, you know, 'Have you ever been hit by your parents? What do you want to be when you're older? Do you want to have children?'”

Driving Into Wall's debut season garnered a 2012 Helpmann Award nomination, saw the show picked up by the Opera House and Riverside Theatres, and also sparked interest from international parties. The response has been so overwhelming that Sheedy and Miller are heading back out on the road. “Because of the great response we've had it's actually been turned into a trilogy,” says Sheedy. “So there is a second part coming and that's based on teenagers on a national level. We're about to go into that investigation, which is a big process, and that will be put together and presented in the near future.”

To assist their research, an online platform, allowing teens from more rural areas to contribute their voices, will be launched. It raises an interesting question: this generation of teenagers – more than any that have come before them – have a channel for their voices in social media. They are hardly silenced, so why give them a leg up?

“For me it was about the public and the private, and that online platform they have is still public, and there are always things that they will not put on there” Sheedy suggests. “And sure, you would argue that there are some teenagers who will spill the beans about everything online, but there is always, always something there which they would never say, and this gave them the opportunity to say it and for it to be heard and voiced and put in a public arena.

“We have teenagers perform it, and there's nothing more affecting than having an actual experience of a real teenager standing there, vulnerable on stage, confessing these things. It's a whole other experience to reading it online.”