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National Interest

National Interest

Opening this month is Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of National Interest.

Melbourne playwright Aiden Fennessy looks at events and the death of Australian journalists in East Timor in 1975, and tells the incredible story of the lives of their families.

The play takes a very different and personal look at an event that rocked Australia – the murder of five young Australian journalists in Balibo, East Timor, in 1975.

While the characters in the play are based upon real persons, it does not attribute everything said to any of those persons.

Taking on one of Australia’s most controversial issues, National Interest explores the nature of justice through the eyes of those to whom justice matters the most.

Australian acting legend Julia Blake stars as Tony Stewart’s mother in the play, which opened on June 11 the Arts Centre’s Fairfax Studio.

Tony Stewart was just 21 when he was killed in Balibo in October 1975. 32 years after Tony and his television news crew were murdered, the ghosts of the past are awakened again during the coronial inquest.

For Tony’s mother June, these ghosts are as real and as tangible as her daughter Jane, standing in the kitchen with her.

Jane wants to lay the ghosts to rest but June can’t let go. Her anger and pain over what happened to her boy have not abated, no matter what the inquest findings are.

Sitting in the kitchen one evening, Jane forces June to open up the old wounds and talk about her feelings. But can truth, time and love heal decades of pain?

Speaking on ABC radio, Fennessy spoke about his cousin, Balibo victim Tony Stewart, and how he came to create this play based around the thoughts and memories of Tony’s mother.

“I think the play is really about me trying to examine what happens to a mother’s story in light of the political and media narrative that has always sat alongside this story,” he said.

National Interest is a deliberately ironic title, whose unspoken obverse is “personal cost”. Fennessy has centred his play on the characters of Tony’s mother June and her daughter Jane.

But he hastens to explain that his characters are “complete inventions” not based on his actual relatives.

“When I asked the Stewart family what they would think about me doing this, I said: ‘There’s no way that I can tell your story. It won’t fit into the format of the play, and I’m probably not good enough to do it.’ So I just said: ‘I’d like to use parts of it but I will make up your characters’.”

“They’ve been very supportive,” he said thoughtfully, in response to a question about how they reacted.

“It’s difficult for them, and it’s painful. So again with that comes a responsibility to articulate that pain, because that’s what we don’t see when a politician is saying:

‘We need to do something about this.’ What we don’t see is the actual, in-the-trenches impact. The play tries to telescope constantly in and out, from a world view to a mother’s view of losing her son.”

The fate of the Balibo Five shocked Australia in 1975 and the issues still reverberate today.

National Interest personalises the headlines with a story of a family who lived through tragedy but refused to be defined by it.

“There’s an exhilarating visual poetry in the way Aidan has let the spirit of these young men come shimmering into the present. National Interest is a ghost story. And also I love his use of the language of media and reportage, the capturing and recording of documentary footage as a theatrical device,” said Pamela Rabe, a member of MTC’s Season 2012 Programming Team.

  • Cast: James Bell, Julia Blake, Grant Cartwright, Michelle Fornasier, Stuart Halusz, Polly Low
  • Director: Aidan Fennessy Set and costume designer: Christina Smith
  • Lighting designer: Trent Suidgeest
  • Sound designer: Ben Collins

Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio June 6 - July 21

www.mtc.com.au

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