Pick Of The Bunch

Ask director Paige Rattray what kind of theatre excites her and the answer is immediate – new Australian work. Her resume certainly suggests as much: she directed Elise Hearst's Dirtyland as part of New Theatre's The Spare Room season in 2011, and brought another new Hearst play to life, The Sea Project, on the Stables stage for Griffin last year. When it came to finding a director for the latest instalment of Australian Theatre for Young People's Voices Project – which brings together the best of new monologue writing from the Fresh Ink emerging playwrights program – Rattray was a natural choice.

“I've got a bit of a history with ATYP. I've taught their ensemble there and a few workshops and different things and I've talked to Fraser (Corfield, ATYP artistic director) about a lot of projects,” explains Rattray. “I work predominantly in new Australian work so I think when he was looking for a director he thought of me and I jumped at the chance, really, because I get to meet ten amazing writers, which is really exciting, so I can scope out all the new talent before it hits the streets.”

The Voices Project first launched in early 2011 with a show made up of a series of monologues exploring first love, Tell It Like It Isn't. Since then it's branched out and offered up short films and another collection of monologues in last year's The One Sure Thing. The 2013 instalment, Out Of Place, is concerned with themes of belonging, identity and place, and presents Rattray with the opportunity to work with those ten fresh Australian playwrights and a cast of ten actors to bring these monologues to the stage Under The Wharf. For now, though, they're in the midst of rehearsal in an expansive and bare warehouse space in Lilyfield. “It's been really amazing because we feel like we've got so much space, and in all of the pieces as well there's some quite epic landscapes that are described – a graveyard, mangroves, a museum, a quarry – so it suits us really well!” Rattray says, before joking about how perfect the isolated patch of suburbia is for the themes at hand. “There isn't anywhere we can even buy lunch out here, or a coffee! So when we have a break we're just hanging around the table together – we really are out of place.”

Combining ten monologues into a coherent production is no small task, though Rattray has risen to the challenge, and is enjoying the unique insight the monologue form offers.

“It's been really wonderful. I think because the actors are so into everyone's work, they've been really generous with each other so we've all worked on each piece together and then the individual actor will take it from there. We've built it together.

“With these monologues you have ten deeply personal experiences; whether that character is imagined or comes from the writer's experience you get an insight into someone's brain rather than a collective of thinking, which is, I think, the really special thing.”