North Fitzroy Gothic

There's trouble in Melbourne's trendiest suburb in Triangle, the latest offering from up-and-coming local theatre company MKA. Shortlisted for the Patrick White Playwrights' Award this year, Glyn Roberts' play is a North Fitzroy splatterfest which mixes the dark and the absurd.

The characters are two women; one, in Roberts' words, “basically a yummy mummy with a sensitive husband and a child with a ridiculous name”. The other is much less smug; she is chronically unhappy and a vampire. One day they meet in the Edinburgh Gardens, and what unfolds on stage are two different versions of their encounter, one which features a cup of tea and a chat, and the other a bloodbath in Piedimonte's.

Reality and fantasy intermingle in the play, but there is no doubt as to the realism of its North Fitzroy setting. Roberts wanted to write something set in Melbourne's most literary suburb after living there himself and being intrigued by its melding of the bohemian and the bourgeois, a mix of students and mums pushing designer prams around organic cafes. He describes it as having “a dark magnetism” despite its gentility. “There's something about that suburb. It has an air of sadness, especially during winter. There's something almost gothic about it.”

The area's gentrifying shabby chic is the perfect backdrop for a creature that drains the life out of others. When someone first suggested writing about vampires to Roberts he was less than impressed. “I was like,” he laughs at himself and mimes extreme cynicism, rolling his eyes, “forget about it”. But somehow the idea took hold. He is interested in the zeitgeist around vampires – just think Twilight and True Blood - and what each era's “ghoul of choice” says about its values. “I thought, what does this monster  – basically a flying glamourous parasite – do, and I guess, what does it represent?”

The mythical creature is set against a familiar Melbourne iconography. A specific sense of place is important to Roberts. “You see so many plays which just reference obscure little bits of England or France. Americans do it all the time, they're constantly referencing bizarre parts of Los Angeles that they think we'll know.” He feels that cultural cringe often prevents Australian playwrights from setting things locally. “I think it's a bit of a problem in Australian playwriting. We shouldn't be scared of setting things in Melbourne.

“At the same time, if your play is good, and it has universal themes, when you show it to a foreign audience, they don't really care [that they don't know where North Fitzroy is].” Triangle recently had a staged reading in Berlin. “They don't know where the suburb is, but they kind of know it at the same time.” It's Melbourne's inner north, but as the play's blurb says, “If it were somewhere else it could be Notting Hill or Mitte”.

Roberts is delighted to have been shortlisted for the Patrick White Playwrights' Award, although he's not sure of what the Australian literary bastion himself would have made of the deconstructed vampire horror, were he alive today. “[He might] refuse to come outright. Or he might come to the show, stay in the bar and heckle from outside.” He pauses to imagine the scene and laughs. “I hope he'd do that.”

Triangle opens Wednesday 25 July and runs until 4 August, MKA Pop Up Theatre, 64 Sutton Street, North Melbourne.