Baring It All

When I attended Monash University, I arrived on the campus theatre scene a couple of years after they performed two plays entitled Bog and Laugh Out Loud, written by some guy who didn't even go to Monash called Declan Greene. Usually a play at a student theatre is forgotten about quicker than it took for a hangover to dissipate the morning after the closing night party. But these plays were still talked about – regarded as some sort of genuine expression of grungy youthfulness.

Since his early on-campus notoriety, Declan Greene's renown has only grown. Sisters Grimm, the company he runs with Ash Flanders, has gone from doing shows in garages and carparks to having their work produced by the Sydney Theatre Company and The Malthouse. His own writing has continued to mature in theme and expand in scale. Greene's 8 Gigabytes Of Hardcore Pornography is being presented as part of Cybec Electric this week at Melbourne Theatre Company. Cybec Electric is a series of five staged readings of diverse and exciting new Australian works selected by literary director Chris Mead. Greene explains the story of 8 Gigabytes: “It's about two middle-aged, overweight strangers. She's hiding this really crippling credit card debt and he's hiding an addiction to pornography. They meet on an online dating website and have a fairly disastrous and humiliating first date and from that point on it gets worse. It's about two people who are trying to overcome their loneliness by looking for something in each other but find each other's bodies too repulsive to get what they need from each other. ”

Greene has never shied away from portraying the shameful, ugly parts of life in his work. While remaining scathingly hilarious, his work is always touched by a deep sympathy for his characters. The play, he says, “has a really simple form, it's really just two people on stage.” Greene is treating this reading a test run before the play enters rehearsals for a production at Griffin Theatre in Sydney later this year. “It's pretty bleak; there's not a lot of hope or redemption or beauty in the piece. So, for me as a writer, I'm constantly sussing out which bits are consistently funny and engaging for an audience, because if those drop it can just feel like a horrible and nasty world to be sitting inside of.” While the bleakness of the work may have made some theatre companies hesitant about the play, a number of individuals have backed it as a winner, such as Lee Lewis at Griffin and Chris Mead at MTC. Greene's entrance through the doors of the major theatre companies is an example of how they are beginning to put their money behind some challenging and exciting contemporary work.