How writing a new take on a Spanish farce helped this author to grieve

Van Badham recalls the last words her mother, Barbara, ever said to her: “You’re a funny little bunny”. It was the end of 2022, and she was in palliative care after an almost-two-year battle with cancer. She was wearing a pair of bunny ears.

It’s just one example of how Barbara kept laughing and making jokes right until she died. “My mother was always the life of the party,” Badham says. “I adored her … When she was in the palliative care hospital, she was dressing up like a chicken to cheer up the other people who were dying there.”

She even wanted her funeral to be a screening of the 1998 Coen Brothers’ comedy The Big Lebowski. “She thought it really defined her as a person,” Badham says.

The loss of her mother is just one of the struggles that have made the past few years some of the most difficult in Badham’s life.

The past few years have been tough for playwright and journalist Van Badham.Credit: Joanna Shuen

“I watched my mother die. I buried her. I have been processing her things. Doing that, being based in Victoria, mum’s house is in Sydney, there’s been enormous financial pressures. And I’m still pursuing this insane career. And my husband [Ben Davison] has been horrendously sick,” she says. “It’s been really rough.”

But the playwright and journalist has been sustained by the writing of her latest play, A Fool in Love, which opens at Sydney Theatre Company this week.

An adaptation of the 17th century Spanish farce La dama boba (The Lady Fool) by Lope de Vega, A Fool in Love follows two sisters, Vanessa (Melissa Kahraman), the clever one, and Phynayah (Contessa Treffone), who is, in Badham’s words, a “dodo”. If Phynayah is married by the age of 30 she will inherit the family fortune – but the sisters need to find a suitor who will stick around.

“Being with my mother when we knew she was dying, and we knew our time together was limited, and we couldn’t go anywhere, and we couldn’t see anyone, it really made me appreciate the role of comedy and how important it is,” Badham says.

“Writing this play has enabled me to be hopeful and sunny and optimistic and really joyous.”

Long before she started writing plays professionally, Badham grew up watching comedy with her family and performing with her cousins at her grandparents’ house.

“There was a double doorway between the lounge room and the hallway, and it had wings - essentially stage left and stage right,” she says. “And it had a pair of red velvet curtains. We would dress up in old curtains and towels and pretend to be space aliens and God knows what else.”

That early experience set Badham up for a career in the theatre. But just as she was making her mainstage breakthrough, with the sell-out success of her uproarious pick-up artist rom-com Banging Denmark in 2019, the pandemic hit, scuppering three commissions.

“Banging Denmark is the play that made me realise that I didn’t have to be serious to be taken seriously as a writer; that actually I am funny,” she says.

Then, after months of lockdown in regional Victoria, during which Badham dived deep into Qanon subculture to write a book, Badham and Davison visited Wagga Wagga to record a live version of their podcast The Week on Wednesday.

That’s where Badham received the life-changing call from her mother, telling her that she was sick. “[She said] ‘I have three different types of cancer, and I am going to die’. And I was like, ‘I’m on the next train’,” she says.

She arranged to meet Davison in Sydney. But this was June 2021, and strict border restrictions meant the couple were separated for the next six months, Badham caring for her mother, and Davison at home with their dog in regional Victoria.

After they reunited, they decided to go forward with their wedding, initially cancelled due to the pandemic, so that Barbara could be there. They held a small ceremony on a beach in south Sydney in July 2022. “I got a $99 dress from the ballroom dancing warehouse because it’d be delivered in 24 hours.”

Badham is again staying in her mother’s home as she prepares to open A Fool in Love. As she and an army of friends clear the house, she has uncovered her mother’s archive of her life in theatre, from scripts she wrote as a teenager, to flyers, sets and costumes for Fringe shows, to reviews of her plays cut from newspapers.

Finding these mementos has inspired Badham to honour her mother by putting all her energy into making A Fool in Love as good as it can be.

“The assistant director [Eve Beck] said to me the other day, ‘We’re your family now’, and I burst into tears,” Badham says. “My parents are dead. I have no brothers and sisters. I’m an orphan, childless, only child. And just the joy that theatre people bring to their work and the craft and the collaboration, it is really like family.”

A Fool in Love is at Wharf 1 Theatre until March 17.