The Now Of It

Based on the real-life murder in the mid 1500s of a man named Thomas Arden by the hand of his wife and her lover, Arden Of Faversham (1592) is claimed as one of the inaugurating texts of the true crime genre. Some 420-odd years later, Melbourne indie theatre company, The Hayloft Project, is adapting the play as their upcoming production, Arden vs. Arden. As Artistic Director and Arden vs. Arden writer, Benedict Hardie tells me, that gap between eras can sometimes seem as slim as a 15-minute intermission.

The author of the original text is unknown. “I discovered [Arden of Faversham] in a book of plays that may have been written by Shakespeare,” Hardie explains. “It contains a lot of the elements that people like about Shakespeare: complexly drawn characters and beautiful language. There are a couple of characters called 'Black Will' and 'Shakesbag' and Shakespeare's mother was actually related to Thomas Arden, so there're plenty of connections. But ultimately the question of authorship is one that I'm not too concerned about. What we're working off is the words on the page.

“At the start of the play the wheels are already in motion. People have already decided that they're going to kill this guy. There's not a lot of room for doubt.” From there, the play oscillates between tragedy and farce whilst remaining sharply engaged with contemporary political and social issues.

This visceral and urgent tension makes Arden Of Faversham an ideal text for Hayloft's style of adaptation. As in their previous productions, Thyestes, 3xSisters and By Their Own Hands, characters play chicken with the edge of what it means to be human: a universal and timeless phenomenon. As Hardie says, Hayloft always go to texts that “have some sort of exciting frisson with now.” Here, capitalism, greed, and other perils of the 'modern' world reach across the ages.

In terms of structure, Hayloft have “created an entirely modern adaptation of the first fifty per cent of the play only. So, in the first half of the play, we're all very much modern characters living in Tony Abbott's Australia, and in the second half, suddenly we revert to the heightened poetic state of the original words. It's sort of two plays that smash up against each other. But the characters and the storyline are a constant.

“I'm really interested in butting things up against each other and not necessarily making them fit, seeing how that feels in a theatre; to be presented with 'my world' and then to see 'my world' change. I get the rug pulled out from underneath me.”

Such potentially uncomfortable theatre experiences, for Hardie, create crucial opportunities for empathy. “I think it would be foolish for Melbourne to hide in its little Green bubble. It's practically seceding from the nation. What it needs to do is engage with people in the country who perhaps voted the other way. It's not necessarily where my political ideologies lie, but I think it's something important, otherwise we're not actually talking to one another.”

WHAT: Arden vs. Arden
WHEN & WHERE: 20 November to 8 December, Northcote Town Hall