Interviews With 10 Australian Authors, Ch 7: Playing with Hannie Rayson

Tom Tilley speaks to Hannie Rayson.

TOM TILLEY:

Hannie, so great to meet you, and I actually cried while I was reading Hotel Sorrento. Maybe 'cause I was at altitude. I've also cried during Love Actually by Hugh Grant as well. But I think this time it was definitely the power of your writing. So… OK, we'll get into Hotel Sorrento in a minute. First, I want to talk about your career because you actually were planning to be an actor, but, very suddenly, before you'd even finished university, you became a playwright.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Well, that's right. I… I started out at university, I did an arts degree, and I thought I'd be a psychologist — that was my plan. And then there was a fork in the road and I got into acting school at the College of the Arts, and I did two years acting. And there was a thing you did in drama classes where it was called 'impulse work', where you stood against the wall and you waited for an impulse. And it was all about trying to tune your human instrument to be ready. You know, like I mentioned, like a tiger or something ready to pounce. You are instinctually very open. And when you felt the impulse, you had to rush… You're wearing leotards and all that sort of stuff.

TOM TILLEY:

Of course.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Slithering over other bodies as well. We did a lot of that. So you stood against the wall and you waited for an impulse, and when the impulse struck, you ran to another wall. And I was there standing against the wall and I never had an impulse.

TOM TILLEY:

Oh, no.

HANNIE RAYSON:

No, I was completely impulse-less. And it went on for weeks. I saw other people having them and I thought, 'I want what she's got.' But I didn't have one and so I thought, you know, I could manufacture it, but I went to the… You know, I dragged my sort of impulse-less body to the dean of the drama school and I said, 'I really don't want to be an actor. I want to be a writer.' And he said, 'Well, do you have a typewriter?' And I did. And… He sort of stared out the window for a while and he did this amazing thing where he just leaned in and he pulled open the drawer of his desk and he held out the key and he said, 'This is the key to… down the corridor, to the room at the end of the corridor. That's your room. Go and write a play.'

(Tom laughs)

HANNIE RAYSON:

So… I did. You know, and it was a kind of, I don't know, an incredible gift of faith and courage. And I feel very indebted to him. His name was Peter Royston. He died a few years ago. I feel very warmly and indebted to him because I… You know, I think to myself, I'd love to be able to give that gift to somebody else too 'cause it was the turning point for me.

TOM TILLEY:

You'd had a couple of successful plays by the time you wrote Hotel Sorrento in 1990, and it really delves into the Australian identity. Was that something we were questioning in a very different way at that time in 1990, compared to the way we are now?

HANNIE RAYSON:

I think we were. In 1988, there was the bicentennial celebrations and the newspapers were full of discussions and, you know, television, current affairs. Everybody was talking about what did it mean to be Australian. And, I mean, I don't think anyone cares about that anymore. But then… I mean, I think we do care about it, but then we were earnestly discussing it and it was less about our multiculturalism then and diversity as a community, which we certainly are focused on now. It was more about our sense of who we were as distinct from Britain. You know, who… what it meant to be Anglo-Australian really was the issue, I think.

TOM TILLEY:

And post-colonial guilt? Working through that as well?

HANNIE RAYSON:

Yeah, no, well, really? I'm not that sure that… I think that's sort of been… It was a theme, but, you know, people skidded over that a lot, and continue to act with a sort of forgetfulness and amnesia about those issues to do with Indigenous Australia, um… white people. But then it was more to do with what it meant to be culturally Anglo-Australian rather than British-Australians, sort of. We were very focused on the centre of all cultural activities being British. And that was something that I was very engaged with too because I was part of a big nationalist movement that, um… A sort of second wave thing, I guess, that began in the '70s with publishing houses like McPhee Gribble that were picking up Australian writers and making them part of their brand for their publishing house. And that sort of just morphed, in some ways, into Text Publishing now, I think. Maybe they don't see it like that. In the theatre, you know, people like Alex Buzo, Jack Hibberd, David Williamson, John Romeril, were writing, and it was the first time that I had ever seen theatre where people spoke in my voice and had cultural references that were mine. Prior to that, we'd just seen British and American theatre, and that everything that was British was superior. You know, was… And not just British theatre but, you know, I grew up entirely believing that unless you were hovering around the samovar in Moscow, or, um, with a Chekhov play, or in a French prison with Chaney, or languishing in a sort of Norwegian drawing room, that that was where art resided, that art would not reside in my family's backyard, around the barbecue. That was for jokey, rather slight people. You know, who didn't understand the profundity of the human condition.

TOM TILLEY:

You sound like Edwin, one of your characters.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Do I? That's true, you know, in all of the characters in all of the plays, they're probably infused by me and my feelings about things. I don't imagine that that's what's happening. I always imagine that I'm doing research and that I'm actually bringing other people into… Well, actually, not into me. I'm bringing other people's lives into my machine. 'Cause they sort of live in there, these imaginary people. But, actually, obviously, they're coming around, you know, through being mediated by me — I'm the writer.

TOM TILLEY:

Something I think you capture in this play is this feeling you get when you're overseas and you think about your life in Australia and the Australian identity. It's this mixture, sometimes, of embarrassment but this kind of romantic pride in being Australian. Was that something that you felt yourself when you were in London?

HANNIE RAYSON:

The way I start writing a play is that I think about a big sociological phenomenon that I find hard to get a beat on, and I would like to use the process of researching the play and thinking about the play to, kind of, understand. So I ask a big question. So the big question for Hotel Sorrento was — what does it mean to be Australian? What is it? And I thought that a good way to get some perspective would be to go away. So I applied to the Australia Council to go on a bus trip around Europe. I'd just read a Murray Bail book called Homesickness, which was about a bus trip, and it seemed like a really great format. Everybody on the bus would be Australian and all vestiges of identity would be… shared in some ways and our only connecting point would be our Australian-ness, and that would be how I would, kind of, shape this.

TOM TILLEY:

You basically went on a wild Contiki tour.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Yeah, but not Contiki. I decided I needed… not just young, I needed it to be a mixture 'cause, you know, like TV, you need to get coverage in your play — you need old people and young people, and men and women, and blah, blah. Anyway, so, I go to the travel agent in London and, at this point, I'm thinking, 'I'm having such a good time. I've gotta go on a bus. Damn it.' So I go in to the travel agent, I said, 'Look, I want to take a bus trip, but will there be Australians onboard?' She went, 'Oh, yes. There's always Australians onboard.' And I said, 'But, like… How many onboard?' How many… 'Would there be 50 onboard?' And she went, 'Oh, you know, there'll be Australians. There always are.' I said, 'No, but would there be, like, 25…? 20?' And she looked at me and she said, 'You know what? I think that you might get something out of mixing with people from other nationalities.' I thought, 'Mm. This is a low point.' And I got on the bus, forgot that, just paid my money, got on the bus, and when I went to Victoria station to get on, there was one Australian onboard the bus and she had been to the very same drama school as me.

TOM TILLEY:

Failure.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Mm. So, you know, massive cross-section of the Australian community. And, at that time, there was a big discussion amongst all my peers and people I knew in London all about the Booker because Peter Carey was a contender and that's what gave me the idea for Meg, my character. I felt this incredible passion about Peter Carey winning, and I thought, 'Oh, this is an interesting feeling.'

TOM TILLEY:

Feeling patriotic.

HANNIE RAYSON:

I'm feeling very patriotic. Even though I had read The Bone People, which was the one that eventually won, and thought it was one of the most magnificent books I'd ever read. But I still felt like, 'Oh, I hope Peter Carey wins.'

TOM TILLEY:

Now, that whole theme really climaxes at the dinner party where Dick, a very patriotic Australian who is very proud of Australian culture, goes head-to-head with Edwin and Meg. Who do you think comes out on top in that dinner party debate?

HANNIE RAYSON:

Well, I think Dick, even though Dick's views represent so many of my own, and as I said earlier, I was part of a nationalist project that felt… I was… You know, I came in on that wave where people had an appetite for Australian material on stage and in literature. And also, there was a sensibility about female work too, so I'm… You know, was part of a very energising movement that we… that our lives were worthy of celebrating as a subject for art-making. So I felt like, 'Go, Dick!' was my view. I wrote him as hard and as passionately as I could. But then I sort of realised that he was looking like a bit of a party bore, really.

TOM TILLEY:

Killing the vibe.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Killing the vibe. But I love writing that dinner party scene 'cause it was one of those great moments where everything comes together and you've got so many people to wrangle on stage. And there are seven people on stage or something and everybody has got an agenda. So the way I do that, actually, when I'm writing those big scenes is that I write from one person's perspective and then I go, 'Urr,' like that, and then I write as if I'm the next person, turn it round and I write it over and over again so it does get that whirly, kind of, feeling about it. So it… It has a lot of fire underneath it, and wind underneath that scene. So I feel very pleased with it and they actually… In the film, they did only one take, so they were thrilled that they could shoot that like that 'cause everyone's talking at the one time. Um, but, yeah, so they're my sentiments. It was just… So, who comes out on top? Um, I don't know. I think the… I don't know the answer. (Laughs)

TOM TILLEY:

Does it kind of stay at the status quo, really, where you've got everyone who's condescending — Meg, who's slightly embarrassed about her Australian identity, but longing to reconnect with it, and Dick, this sort of slightly angry, patriotic Australian…

HANNIE RAYSON:

I think, yeah, everybody's touched by it 'cause they all sort of… they change a bit slightly as the play moves, as the play moves towards a finale. So I think… We were all mad, at the time, about expatriates going away and sounding off. And, you know, even when I think about Edna Everage at that time, she was in her heyday, and I used to find it very funny and I used to laugh with everybody else but I had a slight sense that I've shared with Dick of thinking, 'Do we need to have these… Does that image of us, that we're projecting to the world, need to be so… crass?'

TOM TILLEY:

So, as well as the Australian identity, which you unpack so much in this play, one of the other themes is secrets, and the way that secrets are bound up in families and, actually, the bit that made me cry was Troy, this kid, who is earnestly questioning and wanting to understand his family and himself. What is it about the way secrets get trapped inside families?

HANNIE RAYSON:

The thing with families, which is endlessly interesting to the playwright, writer, is, um, is just the way patterns kind of set in quite early and it's hard to break them. And, um… And secrets are often carried with people to the grave. You know, all families are different. Some families are very much more volatile like little spitfires and things get aired and aired with passion and rage that it's hard to undo as well. People say things in the heat of the moment and then wish they hadn't and that's carried as a wound from somebody else. So I think families are terribly interesting and I have this image, with Hotel Sorrento, of three women, the three sisters, sort of having an invisible elastic band around them that kept them in Sorrento and then one went to Britain and one went to New York — one went to London, one went to New York, and one stayed home. Then, suddenly, the elastic band had snapped, and there they were, back in their family home in Sorrento. And they were still the same little girls but, this time, in women's bodies. I feel like that in my own family, and observing other people, that it's so hard — I'm the youngest of three, and I'm always… I feel like I'm always the little sister. And it's so hard for me to keep purchase on being a person with gravitas in amongst… My brothers are ten years older than me, so I have to keep… I'm still, you know, 'Listen to me!' Um, that's just a silly example, but there's a lot of stuff that everybody has, that I think… ..makes it hard, sometimes, to break out of the… ..stultifying secrets that keep us from talking to each other. And this is… They've got a big secret too.

TOM TILLEY:

Yeah, well, it's a pretty juicy secret that involves adultery…

HANNIE RAYSON:

Yeah, that's right. It involves adultery and… Like, it's a pretty… You know, that's a pretty tough thing to cope with. Your husband having a relationship, sexual relationship, with your sister. And so these things are… These wounds are deep. And then he dies in a car accident. And so, sort of, tragedies of that order… ..they're kind of stabbed fairly deep and then wounds, they don't heal. They crust over.

TOM TILLEY:

Which would be hard in any family, or amongst any human beings. But, in this case, you've got a novelist who decides to turn that into print, which helps her career and elevates her beyond the verge of winning a Man Booker Prize, which the sisters find a little bit… distasteful, like she's shared something that they haven't even talked about amongst themselves yet, for her own benefit.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Mm. Yeah, there's a kind of treachery about this stuff. I mean, it would be worse, I guess, if she had used their real names, but they don't think that…

TOM TILLEY:

Yeah.

HANNIE RAYSON:

..that that makes a jot of difference, but, in a way, um, she's felt a little bit safer by fiction. And I've just written a memoir myself and I feel like the issues that Meg was facing… I feel totally sympathetic towards Meg's situation. I feel sympathetic toward them all, and, I mean, that's the key to… ..writing a good play, I think, is that everybody… You're inside looking out from each of the characters so you're not applying judgement to one or another or barracking for one more than another. You sort of love them all, even in their… Even old Wal, who dies at interval, you know, I love him dearly. And even though he's full of old Australian, kind of, racism and bigotry and all that, even that, there was a deep affection that I felt for that man and that language, too, that was the language of rural and old Australia. We still hear it in the country, but we don't hear it in urban areas so much now. Um, but I do feel sympathy and empathy for Meg because…

TOM TILLEY:

Because you've ripped off your family's secrets and made money and fame out of them? Is that why?

(Both laugh)

HANNIE RAYSON:

Because, um… yeah.

(Tom laughs)

HANNIE RAYSON:

Because I… ..I understand the writerly impulse to want to express and especially when there is something that's been gnawing away at you that is… 'Cause Meg felt that she, through loyalty, and loyalty to family, that she was keeping somebody else's secret, and bearing the brunt of it. And she moved away, feeling that the whole town had turned their back on her. And she felt that she'd made a moral choice and she was not betraying her other younger sister. Now, these are hard things to wear and the desire to then write them — it's the first or the second book, but she's got that autobiographical impulse that a lot of writers have. That really true, dynamic writing comes from stuff you know and so she sort of fudged it a bit in the book Melancholy. I've often been tempted to write Melancholy myself, actually.

TOM TILLEY:

That'd be great.

HANNIE RAYSON:

I think books set in small country towns are great. I love reading those. But, you know, so, I understand that impulse and somehow hoping that people will… that it will crack open something in your family that you've been unable to crack open, but not treating it as revenge or not treating it as a sense of betrayal.

TOM TILLEY:

Well, I think it's a lot easier…

HANNIE RAYSON:

Horrifying.

TOM TILLEY:

Yeah, if the family has already talked about it and dealt with it, then you can tell the secrets and share them with the world. But in this case, they hadn't been able to talk about it themselves yet. And that's why it's so painful.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Well, that's true. That's true. She was… It was muddle-headed of her to have done that. And, you know, were she my friend, I would have counselled against it.

TOM TILLEY:

Yeah, and speaking of the book Melancholy, um, melancholy is a theme that's explored in the play at a few different points, and it's a celebration of it, in a sense, of this kind of reflective sadness that you can really enjoy sometimes.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Yeah, I wrote Hotel Sorrento just after my son was born. I took a few years to write it, partly 'cause I was tending to being a mum. And I did, I felt very infused by a sense of… I mean, I just loved it. I loved the whole period of it. And, you know, when some people are having trouble with early motherhood 'cause they can't get on with their artwork and stuff, I sort of love the way it made me feel. And I couldn't really describe it any other way. It's not 'melancholy' like depression. It was 'melancholy' like 'open to the world', like compassionate, as if my heart was kind of completely open. And I think that feeling is a lovely feeling, and a feeling that I want all my work to try and provoke in others. You know, I'm hoping that people will feel, at the end of seeing a play or reading something I write, that it might jog a kind of openness and compassion and empathy with others. Because I think that's quite subversive as well. It makes us not rush to judgement, not be so frightened of others not being… ..not feeling the… ..impulse to racism, but curiosity. So, which is, the thing that you want to inspire in others — being curious about how other people live and think and put their world view together. Um, so, I did feel all of that. And I also felt that it was a kind of female thing. Whether that's true or just me being… ..you know, riding in on a kind of intense feminism at the time, but there was a desire in the theatre and in literature to actually hear women's voices. Mostly in theatre 'cause women have been writing novels in Australia. But in the theatre, there wasn't a lot. And we had brilliant actresses, we still do, and they didn't have the roles. They didn't have big, dynamic roles to play. They were often brought in as the waitresses or somebody's mum or somebody's girlfriend hovering around in the background or in the wings. And I wanted to write roles that were multidimensional and passionate and angry and women could be ugly and pains in the arse and…

TOM TILLEY:

Strong and successful?

HANNIE RAYSON:

Strong and successful and sulky and everything that was, you know, the whole gamut of female experience. I wanted to write that. And, you know, this gave me an opportunity to do that, and also gave really wonderful actresses a chance to get their teeth stuck into good roles. And, interestingly, the men who were in the play, and then in the film… It was a new experience for them because they were not driving the drama.

TOM TILLEY:

Yeah.

HANNIE RAYSON:

The story was being driven by women. And so, I guess that sensibility that we talked about, the sweet, pensive sadness, was… It's like Sorrento, the bay beach. When you go down there, it is like that. It's… I don't know, there's something lyrical about it. You know, very… Those beautiful Norfolk pines and the gentle bay water lapping at the beach… I'd spent a lot of my childhood there and I love it. It's a lyrical place.

TOM TILLEY:

Mm.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Poetic.

TOM TILLEY:

Yeah, and I think, also, in terms of the reflection, it sits, looking back at Melbourne as well, so you get the sense that you're away from the energy of the city, but still connected to it.

HANNIE RAYSON:

It's lovely. That's really true. It's so true. And, recently, I was given a house to work from. RMIT was bequeathed a house in Dromana and it was owned by a ship's captain. And he used to bring the ship in through the heads and he would kind of honk the horn and his wife, with their brood of children, would know that he was coming back, and she'd then see the ship and hear the horn. And she used to bundle the children in the car and drive up to Melbourne to go and collect him. I love that story, I thought that was very romantic, like her husband was coming back, you know?

TOM TILLEY:

It's very cute. So, only a few years after you wrote this play, it was turned into a film, directed by Richard Franklin. Did you like it?

HANNIE RAYSON:

Before he made Hotel Sorrento, he'd done all this work with Hitchcock and he'd made all these, sort of, road movies and stuff, and I thought, 'Why would you be interested in my sort of…' I imagined art-house, 'little art-house story,' you know? It's not got any road chases or car accidents or anything.

TOM TILLEY:

Not even any violence.

HANNIE RAYSON:

No. And I thought… When I started to look at the rushes, I thought, 'Mm, this film needs a car accident.'

(Both laugh)

HANNIE RAYSON:

'This film needs a bit of violence.' But, actually, when it was sort of put together, I was really, really pleased. You know, he wanted just to be able to shoot plays, and I thought, 'Look, just do the play then. I think it needs a screenplay.' And we varied a bit about that and some of the structural issues in the film perhaps could have had a little bit more of a screenplay treatment in my view. However, you know, it was the play on screen, so…

TOM TILLEY:

Which is a tribute to your writing.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Yeah, well, he won an award for it.

TOM TILLEY:

Off your hard work.

HANNIE RAYSON:

An AFI Award. You know, he did see the irony in that, but, no, he puts some very good jokes in it, which I pretended were mine, but they were his.

TOM TILLEY:

Hannie, it's been fantastic speaking to you and getting right into Hotel Sorrento. Thanks so much for speaking to us.

HANNIE RAYSON:

Thank you very much, Tom.

Logos for Splash ABC, Education Services Australia and Copyright Agency Reading Australia appear on screen.