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When Two Artists Fall In Love

Dave Drayton

“You Know Sometimes Those Things Just Get Under Your Skin?"

Many years ago Melissa Cantwell and a Vietnamese friend sat in a jazz bar somewhere in the belly of Ho Chi Minh City.
 
As a pianist played in the background, the friend relays the story of a friend of a friend of a friend, or is it urban legend? “There’s a pianist who fell in love with a French woman during the Occupation and they have this passionate, beautiful love affair, and then she left him to go back to France to visit family. She calls one day to say she’s never coming back and he went blind.”

She couldn’t shake the story and the seed planted by her friend has grown into Cantwell’s first play in seven years, The Song Was Wrong. “You know sometimes those things just get under your skin? This stayed with me and grew. There’s something so beautiful about the piano as a live instrument on stage. I knew I wanted piano to be part of it, and it was a process of finding an actor who was also able to play, which was in itself an interesting challenge.”

"I knew I wanted piano to be part of it, and it was a process of finding an actor who was also able to play, which was in itself an interesting challenge.”

Nick Wales answered the call, joining an eclectic team that includes movement director Lisa-Scott Murphy and designer Bruce McKinven, with costumes by Aurelio Costarella and Fleur Kingsland. “There’s something kind of transcendent about Nick’s work,” Cantwell reflects, “from scoring for piano to a lot of interesting performance work as well and he just felt like he had the scope for the show. It opened up a lot of possibilities for me. Nick’s reply to the initial script and treatment of the work was to create various pieces in response and from there I could respond to that in the final writing of the piece. We’ve led each other in a way, and what his music has offered me is possibilities for scenes that I may not have otherwise imagined. It was interesting to propose a story to a composer about a composer — the main character in the work is a composer and a pianist and so that was an interesting conversation to be able to have with someone who exists in that world, who is able imagine that relationship with a muse or relationship with a lover and what it means if they leave, so it’s been interesting in that way to have a composer working on the piece from its early days.”

The tale has also been recontextualised from the one passed onto Cantwell in the Ho Chi Minh City jazz bar. In The Song Was Wrong, an Australian composer falls in love with a French photographer — we witness their passionate collision before exploring each life individually, either side of this moment. “I am interested in that relationship between two artists and what we’re able to share with our audience in that sense. The creative process that we go through as individuals and looking at what happens in that shared space when two artists fall in love. I hope that it gives a little bit of an insight into that side of the artist’s life.”