It’s time to face the truth, as MTC rolls out its new 2021 shows

Declan Furber Gillick saw a play when he was 26, a professional production that had made the rare long trek to his home country in central Australia. It changed his life.

“I went, ‘Oh, whatever is happening here, I want to learn that’,” says the Arrernte writer and performer, now 30. From polemic poetry and music, he started a journey into drama.

Playwright Declan Furber Gillick has written his first play for Melbourne Theatre Company.Credit: Simon Schluter

That journey hits a new milestone in 2021. Gillick’s new play Jacky, a hard-hitting, disarmingly funny play about family, culture and love in contemporary Australia, features in this year’s Melbourne Theatre Company season, announced on Tuesday.

MTC artistic director Brett Sheehy doesn’t mince his words. “Having worked with quite a lot of writers over my career I’m completely confident Declan’s going to be one of the great Australian playwrights,” he says. “He’s that good.”

Gillick developed Jacky as a resident writer at MTC, and says the company’s Next Stage program gave him “what every writer, worker and artist needs and deserves: a modest living wage”. But above solving the material stress and insecurity that got in the way of his writing practice, it let him “pursue my writing and my ideas authentically and without judgement or an intellectual muzzle”.

“I never thought a play like this would be programmed at MTC. It’s pretty wild.”

Jacky, he says is “an inquiry into integrity and the capacity of people to live with dignity and honour in a world where commerce, the changing nature of media and a country’s contested political history undermine basic human trust”.

The MTC’s Act 2 announcement, of its 2021 program from May onwards, revolves around themes of truth and lies.

There’s The Lifespan of a Fact, an American play (which starred Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway) about fake news and fact checking, and whether ideology is more important than being rigorously truthful.

There is French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth, a dark comedy that wowed London’s West End with a drama of infidelity and betrayal. There’s a gender-flipped version of the classic deception story Cyrano, and Shakespeare’s warm-hearted comedy of disguise and seduction, As You Like It.

“Declan’s going to be one of the great Australian playwrights,” says MTC artistic director Brett Sheehy.Credit: Simon Schluter

Sheehy says issues of the truth, and what we owe to each other in speaking honestly, “weigh on me constantly”, and influenced his programming for his penultimate season in the role (he will also program 2022, but his successor will see it into production).

He’s not yet doing exit interviews, but he’s in a reflective mood.

“Of course I’m deeply flawed but ultimately I hope I’m a devotee of the truth,” he says. “And you know there can be staggering drawbacks to honesty. Really damaging drawbacks. Honesty can rob one of something immensely valuable.

“But [the alternative] begins with fake news and now it seems to be infecting everything, this twisting of the truth, and what is true and who’s telling the truth.”

So is the role of theatre to confront us with truths, or distract us with fictions? Sheehy believes “absolutely both”.

“I love going into the theatre and being transported, and just having my heart filled, withdraw and being taken away from the world that I’m living in for a period of time,” he says. “But likewise I love being confronted with the truth and a mirror to our society being on stage.

“I do sometimes get frustrated with the so-called ‘heritage art’. With deep and full respect for the classics, the possibilities of the contemporary and the relevant in some spaces is so rarely explored... across all forms, a greater pursuit of relevance and contemporary truth-telling and storytelling should be an imperative for us all.”