Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas to open at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne
Christos Tsiolkas reflects on what inspired his exhilarating debut novel Loaded, now coming to the stage.
Christos Tsiolkas was still a young man when his first novel, Loaded, was published in 1995 – and so was its sex-mad, disaffected, rude, out-of-it and utterly electrifying protagonist, 19-year-old Ari.
The novel follows Ari across 24 hours in Melbourne, as one night of parties, booze and drugs rolls into the next: a wild night of music, anonymous sex, more drugs, dancing on tabletops, drives across the city and crashing parties.
Ari is a bundle of contradictions and political incorrectness. He is a man who has sex with men but who thinks gay men are “faggots”. His family is Greek, but Greeks are “wogs”. The worst thing of all is to have sex with another Greek man, another wog.
What carries the reader along on this Melbourne odyssey is Ari’s arrogance but also his vulnerability, the cocksure attitude masking a tender heart.
“Ari is sometimes seen as an alter ego – if I had been more courageous or more reckless,” Tsiolkas says of his literary creation from a quarter-century ago.
“He is trying to make sense of a world that is not necessarily as forgiving or as kind as it can be. There are so many expectations on his shoulders about who he is – whether it’s family, whether it’s society, what does it mean to be gay, what does it mean to be ethnic, what does it mean to be a good person. He’s trying to make sense of it, and that’s where the disaffection comes from.”
Loaded was memorably made into a film, directed by Ana Kokkinos and renamed Head On, featuring Alex Dimitriades as Ari. Paul Capsis was his friend and sometime travelling companion, Johnny, a drag queen known as Toula.
Now Tsiolkas’s characters are being brought to the stage for the first time in an adaptation Tsiolkas has made with Dan Giovannoni. The difference now is that Ari and all the characters he encounters on his revels will be played by a single actor, Danny Ball.
The production, directed by Stephen Nicolazzo, opens at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne on May 5.
Tsiolkas, 57, is speaking after the Orthodox Easter weekend, when he joined his family for a very Greek celebration.
“My brother did a lamb on the spit, which we haven’t done for years, since my dad passed away,” he says. “I think we were conscious that we wanted to give Mum a really special day. It was lovely to have the four generations there.”
Tsiolkas is known for his bestsellers The Slap and Barracuda – both made into successful television series – and for recent books Damascus and 7½. He thinks back to when he was in his mid-20s and wanting to make a career as a writer. He wrote music and film reviews for the street press and tried his hand at short stories. One of those stories, not published, had a character called Ari.
“I always wanted to write a novel and – like everyone who first begins – you just don’t know if you have it in you,” he says. “But I started a short story and Ari’s voice was central to that short story, and that gave me confidence. I liked his voice. I don’t know how to describe it but there was something about his voice that I wanted to pursue.”
Tsiolkas says he responds to Ari’s rawness, but also his tenderness and compassion.
“Even though he’s a brat – in the way that adolescents can be cruel to their parents, their family – I think he has a deep loyalty and love for his mum and dad and his siblings,” he says.
“It’s in those spots where the tenderness comes through. I hope that the stage play carries that through, and that an audience will respond to those moments.”
The novel is a kind of odyssey – a road trip and a drug trip – that takes Ari to the four compass points of Melbourne, fuelled by booze, pot, speed, LSD and ecstasy. Was Homer’s ancient Greek epic a model for this modern-day journey? “The Homer that was in my mind was definitely the Odyssey,” Tsiolkas says.
“It was a tale that I grew up with, because my father would tell me the story of the Odyssey, just in very lay terms. But I always loved it. The thing that gave me a sense that I could write the novel was when I got the structure, which was the four points of the compass … I think there was something about the notion of an odyssey.
“I said to myself: ‘I’m going to write this novel with a 24-hour frame and use the points of the compass.’ That suddenly made it possible. I didn’t know what the ending would be, but I knew what the journey would be.”
The novel captured the atmosphere of Melbourne’s student houses, its clubs and gay scene, and the music of the time.
“It was exhilarating in terms of the music I was listening to, the films I was watching and the books I was reading,” Tsiolkas says.
“And it was a deeply troubling time as well. I had come to adulthood as a gay man and started that slow process of coming out when AIDS was everywhere. I think, in a way, Loaded was a way of making sense of it. A lot of us were no longer comfortable with definitions of what it meant to be gay, or what it meant to be Greek, or what it meant to be Aussie.”
Tsiolkas was first approached by Nicolazzo and Giovannoni about making a theatre adaptation of his short-story collection, Merciless Gods. It was produced by queer independent company Little Ones Theatre in 2017 at Northcote Town Hall in Melbourne, before seasons at Griffin Theatre in Sydney and Arts Centre Melbourne.
The success of that production led Tsiolkas to agree instinctively to the proposal of next staging Loaded, although he was initially cautious about whether Ari, his world and attitudes could make the transition to the early 2020s.
The play was originally planned for the 2020 season at the Malthouse, before Covid lockdowns intervened. It was decided then to produce the script as an audio play, with Roy Joseph in the role of Ari. More than two years later, the play is finally reaching the stage, this time with Ball as Ari.
Ball – who has Italian, not Greek, heritage and is a fraction older than 19-year-old Ari – says the teenager is an exciting character to bring to life on stage.
“He is full of contradictions, and I think that makes him such an exciting protagonist,” Ball says.
“It’s very hard to pin him down. He’s so angry, he’s so full of rage, but at the same time so full of softness and playfulness. I’d say there’s a sense of anarchy about him. He resists everything that people tell him he has to be or do.
“He’s on this journey to find his own authentic way of living – but not in a modern, ‘living my best life’ way. It’s to find his own way of existing in the world that makes sense to him.”
Ari’s preoccupations in the early 1990s were to do with migrant identity and sexuality. Music was on mix tapes, played on a Walkman. Fast-forward to 2020, and it’s mobile phones and social media, and another set of attitudes for Ari to rebel against. He has no time for earnest discussions about climate change, or much else.
“Ari is not susceptible to political correctness, he is not interested in anyone’s politics – it doesn’t matter if they are left or right, he is not interested,” Ball says.
“So there is a kind of provocation in someone who refuses to accept what people might consider to be a smart political view, or an acceptable way of looking at things. And some of the views he has can be quite provocative for an audience today.”
Tsiolkas says he has previously thought of revisiting Ari in fiction, perhaps checking on his progress into early middle age. The stage adaptation has allowed him and Giovannoni to airlift Ari out of the early 1990s and land him in the no less bewildering modern world.
“What would Ari think of identity politics?” Tsiolkas says. “That was quite exciting to think about because he is a person who doesn’t want to be labelled. So there’s a frisson that happens in the work: a challenge between the past and the present, constantly knocking up against each other.
“That’s been the most vital and exciting and – I will use the word now – scariest part of doing this adaptation.”
What of a new actor taking on the role of Ari, Tsiolkas’s maybe/maybe not alter ego? He allows that, just as Dimitriades and Capsis helped create the characters of Ari and Johnny on screen, Ball likewise will make Ari his own. Tsiolkas says he admires Ball’s energy, youth and fearlessness.
“It’s an exhausting part and it’s a really draining part, and he is chasing that – he’s not afraid of it,” Tsiolkas says.
“He’s not afraid of the darkness that’s there in Ari, he’s not afraid of the tenderness …
“This is a one-person show and Danny can do all those characters. And because he is so young, he brings a youthful energy to the part, and that’s really exciting. You’re afraid for him, you’re caring for him. Watching Danny reminds me of how beautiful and precious being young is.”
Loaded is at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, May 5 to 28.