Grief, Joy, Sadness And Faith

"A lot of people are blessed with a spirit that remains calm, but I’ve got this curse where I frantically chase things until I get them,” explains Julia-Rose Lewis, with a confidence softened by optimism. “I’ve been blessed to go from opportunity to opportunity and be supported by a wonderful network of people in Sydney and in Brisbane. I still feel like I’m figuring out, every day, how to write a play. I think the thing that has helped me get so many opportunities has been my desire to learn, less than my existing skill. I think people can see how engaged I am and how much I want it.” 

People certainly noticed something in her. After participating in the Australian Theatre For Young People’s Voices Project: Out Of Place, in 2012 Lewis was writer-in-residence at Brisbane’s La Boite Theatre throughout 2013 and then last year was awarded the Philip Parson’s Playwright Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights by Belvoir for her play, Samson.

"I still feel like I’m figuring out, every day, how to write a play."

The play, which has been programmed by both La Boite and Belvoir in their 2015 seasons, grew from a ten-minute monologue that started Lewis’ forceful foray into playwriting, written for the ATYP studio. “The main character of that was this 17-year-old girl called Mia. Her voice was so strong to me and I kept going back to her after writing the monologue, and in many ways Essie, who is played by Ashleigh Cummings, is in one way the driver of the action, and her character was really born from Mia – I wasn’t done with her yet, it felt like she had a lot more to say, she hadn’t finished expressing herself.”

Lewis’ passion for writing stories began during her childhood in a town called Maleny some two hours drive from Brisbane. The action of Samson – four friends gripped with grief and contemplating the expanse of life beyond that moment and their town – takes place in a similarly isolated setting. “Where significant events happen to you in your life is where your heart is. The death of my father happened in Maleny and I’ve always had a connection to that place and that influenced why I set Samson where I did, and the isolation speaks thematically to the play. All the young people in the play are islands trying to find a way to bum together and figure it all out.”

Lewis credits the kaleidoscopic scope of the play to inexperience, an excited and eager restlessness, and traits of her freneticism, the blessing or curse, are discernible. “I think it’s because it’s my first play, you don’t just come up with an idea for a first play because you’ve been coming up with it, I have been coming up with it for 25 years. It is everything that I haven’t written for 25 years in one. I don’t really know what Samson’s about, but it’s about all these things: grief, joy, sadness, faith, the death of a friend, the birth of a child.”