Article: A SAVAGE VALENTINE

Richard Watts speaks with lesbian playwright Alana Valentine about euthanasia, spirituality, and her play Savage Grace.

"Some of the most intellectually engaged and religiously opinionated people I know are gays and lesbians, because we’re huge consumers of cultural product and we’re often the target of religious lies," Alana Valentine explains, when asked why she chose to make the two characters in her play Savage Grace gay men. "I felt that the kind of plays which we’re served up in festivals usually draw an audience through a bit of beefcake or cheesecake, but honestly, I think that a lot of gay and lesbian people are incredibly keen to engage with much bigger ideas. Besides, I live in Sydney, what don’t I know about gay men?" she adds, laughing.

Valentine has worked as a dramatist for 20 years, and was a founding member, together with playwrights Campion Descent and Alex Harding, of the Gay and Lesbian Arts Alliance. Her critically acclaimed play Run Rabbit Run tackled the grassroots rebellion against the Rupert Murdoch-controlled National Rugby League, while Savage Grace, which opened at Carlton’s La Mama Theatre on Wednesday night, tackles three topics guaranteed to inflame even the most sedate of dinner parties: sex, death and religion.

The play pairs up an unlikely couple: Robert, a religious ethicist, and Tex, a defiantly non-religious doctor who works with patients dying from AIDS-related illnesses; and explores their emotional and romantic struggles as they argue and challenge one another’s opposing moral and philosophical positions.
"The thing for me about this play is that you can never write a play about a subject, you have to write a play about people," Valentine stresses. "What happens with issues about euthanasia or religion is that they’re always discussed rationally, academically, and I really feel that what theatre can do is bring back a notion of love and faith into these arguments."

She says that Savage Grace is focused on the way the characters relate after they have had sex, rather than upon their physical relationship.

"The thing about the sex scene in this play, well in this case the post-sex scene, is that because these men have been intellectually combative the whole way through, we as an audience need to see a change in the way they deal with one another after they sleep together. They become really intimate and really vulnerable, because they put aside the cloak of words. The way in which they get together, and then the post-coital scene, reveals what they now think of each other and their relationship. What is interesting in this play, I think, is that the characters say quite unexpected things; the one you think will still be more sexually uptight is not, so again you have to do what you have to do in all theatre, which is surprise the audience, and have the characters surprise themselves."

Savage Grace is showing at La Mama Theatre, Carlton until 5th June. Bookings on bookings@lamama.com.au or (03) 9347 6142.