This play is about a violent man. So why is he played by a woman?

Patricia Cornelius is one of the toughest voices in Australian theatre, but she can still feel vulnerable when it comes to men. “Most of us know the dangers of the world, even if you haven’t experienced full-on brutality,” she says. “Most of us have crossed the road at night. Most of us have hurriedly put our keys in our door. Sometimes I think I’ve lived my whole life circumnavigating that shit.”

With her long-time collaborator, Susie Dee, the acclaimed playwright has tackled male violence on stage before, but - fittingly in a country reeling from a string of recent murders - their latest production has been described as their most shocking yet.

Bad Boy, which will debut this month as part of the Fringe Festival, is a one-hander starring Nicci Wilks as a male perpetrator.

“We’re not trying to disguise the fact that it’s a woman taking on the male persona,” says Cornelius. “It’s not that you think, ‘is that a bloke or not?’ The audience will know ... that this is a woman in the guise of … a male to explore it with a different gaze, with a different lens.”

Talking to Cornelius, Dee and Wilks in the first week of their rehearsals, the conversation turns to Australia’s horrifying domestic violence statistics; there have been so many recent cases of women being murdered by their partners that we’re mixing up our recollections as each news story blends depressingly into the next.

“You read the news stories,” says Cornelius, “and you just think, ‘what is going on?’”

Bad Boy, says Dee, asks why this is happening here. “And why is it getting worse? Especially with the #MeToo campaign and all these men being ousted. Why is it still happening?”

“I haven’t borne the brunt of it,” says Cornelius, “but the fact that I’ve had to … get out of situations and not from not being provocative at all, is just shocking and shocking for our younger girls. And it’s not changing. It’s just dreadful.”

As Australia’s most unapologetic theatre makers, the trio has examined male violence before. In 2013, Cornelius’ Savages, which won four Green Room awards and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama, explored violent masculinity on a cruise ship; Dee and Wilks’ 2016 work Animal (which won five Green Room awards) also explored domestic violence. Last year’s In The Club, written by Cornelius, focused on the prevalence of sexual assault in sporting clubs. As she says, it’s an immense issue “that has hurt the psyche of our nation”.

Wilks, left, with Kate Sherman in the 2016 play Animal.

Wilks, who began her career with Albury’s Flying Fruit Fly Circus and has worked with companies as varied as Circus Oz, Malthouse and Born in a Taxi, is known for creating and performing theatre that’s both text-based and physical; in Bad Boy her physicality plays off what Cornelius described as her own “grungy poeticism”.

“I mostly write that way – I can’t help it now,” she says. “I feel like [this play] needs that heightened theatricality because to talk about just one man or the ‘bad boys’ experience in a kind of domestic way depletes the magnitude of the problem.”

Cornelius and Dee are known for creating visceral, discomfiting work. They have spent more than 30 years giving voice to the types of characters rarely seen on main stages: the working class, the disenfranchised, the unseen. Or, as Dee once described them, “the people on trams we try to avoid”.

Wilks’ “bad boy” is, says Cornelius, a kind of everyman. “There’s a huge scale to ‘him’ and to his … confessions of that internal world that may or may not exist for all of the men but certainly exists for some men,” she explains. “There’s an examination if you like, of misogyny, and a weak kind of defence of how someone who once loved someone, or thought they did, or made the gestures, can fall down such a tunnel into the … misery and brutality of the opposite of that person.”

“We form a particular type of theatre that we’re interested in exploring,” says Cornelius, left, with collaborators Wilks and Dee.Credit: Eddie Jim

Nothing, adds Cornelius, justifies such behaviour. “There’s a tendency to want to … at least understand it, or make it better, make it kind of, ‘this is why they do it and so we can fix that and they don’t do it any more’, rather than actually saying culturally, it is a huge problem for us and it’s beyond individual men’s behaviour, it is about a culture that condones, basically, hating us.”

Bad Boy, in which Wilks will perform on a specially constructed round platform, has a “slim” script, as Cornelius describes it, and like much of the pair’s work, isn’t easy to describe neatly.

“There’s a narrative arc, but it’s highly theatrical. I think to take material of this kind and treat it naturalistically... I find that hard to do anyway, so I always write in a heightened way,” she says. “We form a particular type of theatre that we’re very interested in exploring, and so I … know the constraints of the theatre that we’re interested in.”

There’s still room for humour in Bad Boy, Dee says, but don’t expect anything too lighthearted. “There’s still a … reluctance at the moment in the arts, ever since COVID, to go anywhere dire, that people need to be uplifted,” she says.

“That shits me,” adds Cornelius. “This emphasis on how theatre has to be sweet and … life-affirming! Sometimes, even though it’s a loaded word, the ‘triggering’ is fabulous rather than always a negative thing.”

That’s what drama is all about, says Dee. “I think we’re all in the industry, a little, to shift, to change, to provoke.”

Good theatre should, adds Cornelius, be an act of resistance. “To back up against something is important, isn’t it? It’s what people love most about the arts in general, when you see something that has amazing oomph or chutzpah, that dares to say something about the world,” Cornelius says. “Like most good theatre this is, hopefully, a provocation.”

Bad Boy is at fortyfivedownstairs from September 26 - October 13. fortyfivedownstairs.com

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