Trent Dalton reveals new project after Logies win
After the Netflix adaptation of his novel Boy Swallows Universe was a big winner at the Logies, author and journalist Trent Dalton has revealed his next, deeply personal, project.
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After the television adaptation of his much-loved novel, Boy Swallows Universe, was the star of the Logie Awards, Trent Dalton has announced his next move.
Boy Swallows Universe snagged a total of five awards at the Logies, including best miniseries or telemovie. Young star Felix Cameron won the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Popular New Talent as well as the Silver Logie for Best Lead Actor in a Drama. Bryan Brown also won Best Supporting Actor for Bryan Brown and Sophie Wilde Best Supporting Actress.
Dalton will now work with Netflix to turn his 2023 novel, Lola in the Mirror, into a television show, he and producer Troy Lum said last night at the Logies.
And he is also working on another new production - a stage adaptation of his Love Stories novel, with the Brisbane Festival.
Love comes in all forms, all colours and by many different roads, as Dalton found out when he sat on the corner of Brisbane’s Adelaide and Albert streets in the autumn of 2021. Dalton asked passers-by to tell him their love stories, the result was a best-selling book, Love Stories, and now a stage production of the same name.
Part of the Brisbane Festival, Love Stories will take some of the real life stories from the book to the stage.
To celebrate, we asked Dalton, his wife Fiona Franzmann and all the creative talent behind the production to share their own love stories. And it turns out, all the songs and poems and stories are true – all we really need is love.
Trent Dalton
Author, journalist, contributor to story & script
Gimme some proof. Show me the hard evidence of this thing called love.
A Brisbane mum carries a hospital ECG printout in her wallet: the heart rhythm of her baby boy whose life was temporarily lost and then miraculously saved by surgeons. Proof of life. Proof of love.
A Brisbane sound technician records his wife saying “I love you” into a microphone. He has the digital sound waves caused by her saying those three perfect words tattooed across his heart.
I’ve been snail-mailed and emailed and whispered enough stories in the past three years to write three more editions of Love Stories, should the world ever need it.
People keep offering up their glorious evidence. Just last night I was talking to a family friend. A brilliant mathematics tutor. She’ll marry a very good man in the coming months.
The other day, she and her fiance found themselves looking at the heartbeat rhythm data from his smart watch. The data crossed weeks and months, and every day, except one, represented a steady heartbeat for the fiance. But on that one anomalous day, his heart rate was spiking to dangerously high levels. Concerned for her fiance’s health, the wise tutor frantically flipped back through her diary to discover what potentially deadly activity he had engaged in that day. Tears welled in her eyes. She turned to her fiance. “That was the day you asked me to marry you,” she said.
Proof of life. Proof of love.
Fiona Franzmann
Journalist, contributor to story & script
When I think of love I think of music. It’s been the backdrop to the best love stories of my life.
My earliest memories involve poring over my parents’ early ’70s vinyl collection, spanning everything from Dave Brubeck to Mozart to the Beatles, Elvis, Motown grooves and the unbeatable compilation Explosive Hits ’75, with its granite-hewn title graphics and bare chested rock stars in wide-collared suits. I didn’t know much about romantic love back then but I learnt everything I needed to know about no-good lovers from Linda Ronstadt’s single sultry song.
Hearing those albums got me hooked on a feeling I never wanted to let go of. Music has been with me for all my defining moments – the biggest, most love-filled moments.
It was there for me in September 2000, helping me realise I was more than just friends with a guy called Trent as we slow-danced to The Smiths at 2am on a Fortitude Valley dancefloor, never wanting the night to end.
Music was there in February 2007 when our eldest daughter was born, Bic Runga’s Precious Things on repeat in my head as I swooned over her perfect newborn face. And it’s there on the mornings I drive our youngest daughter to school; her favourite playlist blaring, she squeezes my left hand, throws me a joyful smile as we belt out Chappell Roan with pure abandon.
Thank you, music, for all the explosive hits … from the bottom of this girl’s heart.
Sam Strong
Director/Dramaturg
I am in love with the team creating Love Stories.
Making something together is like a love affair. And in theatre that’s a particularly intense romance. Rehearsal is only four weeks long; it’s just 10 days between when you move to the theatre for technical rehearsals and open a show.
In that window you might literally meet for the first time, have an exquisite honeymoon period where anything’s possible, fall into the depths of despair about how nothing is working, and then band together to make something life-changing by the inexorable deadline.
Then, if you’re a director like me, you’re potentially leaving early the next morning never to see one another again. Given the beautiful finality of all this it’s not surprising that you gravitate back to one another. Whenever I can I’ll work with people I’ve worked with before. Because you never really broke up. You know one another intimately and now you get to build something together again.
That’s what’s so delightful about the team making Love Stories. Not only is it a reunion of the complete creative team and some of the cast that made the stage version of Boy Swallows Universe, between me and the team there is 35 shows’ worth of history – that’s 35 romances channelled into the next one. It’s a lot of love stories helping make Love Stories an affair to remember.
Tim McGarry
Playwright and adaptor
The day I finally understood unconditional love. My friends knew I was gay, a non-issue, but my parents. It all seemed too hard. I feared judgment and rejection, but my dad’s words on that day in 1994 made me feel safe; but more importantly – deeply loved. I planned on visiting him to finally “break” the news, but before I got there, my mum, fearing his reaction, had already told him. As I walked through the door my sister said, “he knows”. We came face-to-face. He looked at me, kind of sad and said, “I’ve just had the greatest shock of my life, but I want you to know this – you are my son and I love you.
My only regret – you’ll never experience being a father.” Three years later I walked into that same house and told my parents I was fathering a baby with friends, a lesbian couple, and the baby, a little girl, was due in August. My father smiled and said, “Remember what I said to you three years ago, about my one regret? Well, now I have absolutely no regrets. I couldn’t be happier for you.”
Neither could I.
Nerida Matthaei
Choreographer & Movement Director
I have so many love stories. Love stories with myself, with the things I find joy and awe in … sitting by the beach, the first spoonful of cake, dancing, making art, sharing experience with others. I am quite prone to being deeply devoted to many things. My husband, of course, is my greatest love story. It was truly love at first sight. As dramatic as that sounds, we saw each other across a room, and both thought “Who is that?” We are each other’s rock, we are each other’s water, and together we are home.
Harry Tseng
Ensemble
My greatest love story is meeting my wife, Letitia, 14 years ago. It started as what some theatre people call “a showmance”. We met during an independent run of Cosi, by Louis Nowra. I got to know her during rehearsals and thought: “This is someone really interesting, she is so talented, kind, and funny.” But what made me really pay attention to her was after one long rehearsal on a winter morning in Melbourne. It felt otherworldly. This is the reason I thought she is someone so special. This event made me realise she is someone I could see being friends with for the rest of my life. It was cold and dank in the abandoned warehouse, but it was time for lunch. So when one of the cast opened the giant roller door to go outside to eat, I was joyfully surprised by the clear, blue sunny sky. And Letitia had no idea she was standing perfectly in front of where the sunlight was shining while the roller door was rising. The light slowly hit the back of her head like a miracle, covering her strawberry blonde hair with a heavenly glow. After that I just knew.
Ngoc Phan
Associate Director
Hand on heart. I was at my uncle’s home in a small village outside of Saigon. It was my first trip to Vietnam and although I have Vietnamese heritage I felt like a real outsider. It was mainly because I didn’t speak Vietnamese and my family there didn’t speak English. After lunch, we were all sitting around talking, me not so much. My great aunt, who was in her late 70s, was laying in a hammock. One of my cousins told me to gently swing her, as she liked to fall asleep that way. I sat at the top hammock, and could see my great aunt’s silvery hair in the afternoon light. I put my hand on the rope and started rocking. When the hammock picked up momentum I went to take my hand away. Without looking back towards me my great aunt reached over her head and grasped my hand. I thought she was wanting me to swing her more, but it was just to hold my hand. To make a connection with me.
To say I see you. I hear you. I understand you. I felt so much love in that grasp. I gently cried with happiness. We didn’t need words. We were just us. And we stayed like that for nearly an hour.
Michala Banas
Actor, plays ‘Wife’ in the play
With more than
30 years of friendship under our belts, and a deep connection like no other, my best friend and I were more like sisters. Not long ago, she died. My grief was immense to say the least. That grief was, and still is very hard, but it’s also testament to the great love we shared. The love of two women who knew everything about one another, and went through all that life threw at us hand-in-hand.
Right after she passed, I came home feeling beyond lost and heartbroken. I’d never experienced a loss quite like it. I walked through the door of my house, and my dog Gordon, who usually bounces up and zooms around when we come home, slowly made his way over to me where I’d collapsed on the couch, and hugged me. He literally hugged me. A paw on each side of my neck, and his head on my shoulder. I sat there like that for over half an hour, being held by my dog.
For the next week or so as I helped with funeral arrangements, he was my shadow.
I will never be able to fully describe the love I felt from Gordon in that incredibly difficult time, but for those of you with the privilege of experiencing the unconditional love of a pet, you know how special it is. There is something magical in the love we feel for those we choose to have in our lives – human or animal. I am lucky to continue to feel that love for my darling friend, and to be able to show my dog how grateful I am for him every day.
Bryan Probets
Ensemble
When I was five years old my Mum was admitted to psychiatric care. For the next four and a half years she spent time in various institutions while my Dad faced the challenge of bringing up three children on his own while holding down a full-time job. To help alleviate the strain, my sisters and I were separated and taken in by kind relatives and family friends. This was in an era when mental illness was never talked about and you just “got on with it”. The pressure this put on my parents and on the family as a whole, was intense. Even after Mum was eventually released her illness provided ongoing challenges and repercussions. Yet throughout all of this, even in the direst moments, of which there were several, they somehow survived. It was their commitment to each other that proved to be the staying force. Their story is a great lesson in forgiveness, unconditional love and acceptance.
Jeanette Cronin
Ensemble
It was New Year’s Eve, 2000. I’d been at the hospital with my partner at the time – he was critically ill. I watched the nine o’clock fireworks out the window, alone in a neurology ward full of people whose minds rested silently inside themselves – or not. Un-celebration over, I walked home to my borrowed house – I was away from my family – and spoke my usual desperate monologue to myself, “Please let the next day be better. Please let the next day not be worse,” even though I had learnt by this stage that it would be … worse. But just before midnight as I sat on my single bed, the phone rang. Three of our colleagues, young men in their 20s, sitting around a fire on a beach in Byron Bay. “Happy New Year, Jennie.” They talked and gave me comfort. I can’t say they loved me – I’ve barely seen them since – but that night, in my borrowed house, my feet dangling in the ashes of my Love Story, I felt remembered … maybe even loved.
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