Road Toll

An 18-year-old is driving himself and his friends home from his parents' beach house. They crash, he dies. The rest of the story is grief and recovery. The 18-year-old is Jack, a character in Tim Winton's newest play, Shrine, being played by Perth-born, Melbourne-based actor Paul Ashcroft in the Black Swan Theatre production opening the last day of August. The play is named for the iconic white crosses that appear on the roadside sites of fatal crashes, placed there and maintained by friends and families of the victims. Noticing these shrines on his frequent drives through the country, Winton started wondering about the stories behind them. 

Ashcroft too, in the process of rehearsing Shrine, has found himself wondering about the crosses. More specifically, he's been thinking back to his indestructible late teenage years, when one of those crosses could easily have been erected for him. “All the men in the play would certainly agree that we would have been in similar situations where that could have happened,” Ashcroft suggests. “I think a lot about some of the situations I went through as an 18, 19-year-old, and the sort of bluff that men go through, specifically growing up in WA, and thinking, you know, there were a few close calls.”

Ashcroft's character represents the ones who weren't so lucky. This, of course, poses its own dilemma: the problem of your character being killed off at the very beginning of the story.  Fortunately for Ashcroft, Winton's style relies on flashbacks and fluid narrative, instances where the ghosts of the dead are conjured by the recollections of the living. Ashcroft says Winton's writing in general tends to follow a very different format to that which he's used to. His plays are heavy with imagery-based monologues. Characters describe their thoughts directly to the audience, almost Brechtian in style. Ashcroft says it can be a lot more poetic than the sort of theatre he's used to. “For me, approaching it as an actor is like you're using the other hemisphere of your acting brain. It flexes different muscles. I enjoy that sort of writing.”

Winton has been heavily involved in the production aspects of the play as well, another new experience for Ashcroft. “Usually you just get a script and away you go and learn the lines,” he admits. For Shrine, the process has been more involved. Last year, the content was workshopped with the actors. Winton then worked on it for several months and returned with close to a complete script. “And then you mould it once you get on the floor. Tim's been in rehearsals, especially for the first week or so, and even up until now you can sort of still nudge a few things here and there. There's almost a continual exploration of the characters. As you're discovering them on the floor as a performer, he's there as a writer. And that's kind of cool. It's a very interesting process to have the writer on the floor.”