Playwright Hilary Bell on the crest of a wave

IT shaping up to be a very good year for playwright Hilary Bell as demand for her work grow.

Hilary Bell

AS Hilary Bell drinks green tea from a small earthenware cup at her family dining table, one senses a churning anxiety behind her serene smile, her calm green gaze, the broad, smooth plane of her face.

 The award-winning playwright is pressed for time, but is too polite to say so. Her two children have started their summer holidays, and on the day of this interview, she's juggling playdates with 11th-hour rewrites of her new drama, The White Divers of Broome, and a recording session for a demo CD of a musical she is working on.

She's initially reluctant to go to Bondi Beach for a photograph to accompany this article -- it's a drab, windy day and the beach is a 15-minute walk from her modest, semi-detached home in Sydney's east. Yet she not only relents with good grace; within minutes, and with the gusto of an experienced garbo, this petite, almost fragile-looking woman is shoving wheelie bins off crowded pavements for the Review photographer, who is carrying a heavy backpack.

Bell has just returned from Perth, where she sat in on early rehearsals for The White Divers of Broome, and worked feverishly into the small, quiet hours, pruning and perfecting her script. The week before that, she was in London as one of 10 dramatists from around the world chosen to take part in the National Theatre's ambitious youth theatre program, Connections.

In fact, this is looking like a breakthrough year for the mid-career playwright. The White Divers is her first festival show -- it's a cornerstone of the Perth International Arts Festival -- while another work, The Splinter, will be premiered by Sydney Theatre Company in August. Various productions of her youth theatre work, Victim Sidekick Boyfriend Me, are under way in Britain and she has written the libretto for an opera that will be staged in the US in October.

Nevertheless, Bell has been writing plays and screenplays for more than two decades, and is too seasoned to be carried away by this sudden surge in demand for her work. Tracing circles on her table with a flat palm, she reflects that "it's a happy coincidence in one way, that these things are happening. But it's also the result of you toiling away in obscurity and poverty and loneliness for a certain length of time, and if you're lucky certain things will sprout, and in my case, they're all happening at the same time."

The White Divers -- which examines the racial tensions that erupted within Broome's lucrative pearl shell industry in the early 20th century -- is being staged by Western Australia's Black Swan State Theatre Company. "It's certainly my first show on this scale," Bell says, sounding slightly overawed. "It's an epic play and it's an epic production. It's huge!"

The piece is inspired by the award-winning, nonfiction book of the same name by barrister-turned-author John Bailey. Like the book, the play is set in 1912, the year the federal government sought to enforce the White Australia policy by sending British navy divers to Broome to end Asian crews' domination of the pearl-shell diving business. The navy divers were meant to show that white men could do it better, but the experiment went awry. Moreover, the white pearling masters who controlled the industry vehemently opposed the employment of white divers, as their profits hinged on their employment of cheap, "coloured labour".

Now a magnet for tourists, a century ago Broome was the epicentre of the world's pearl shell trade (pearl shell was used to make buttons) and a raw, lawless outpost. The whites who ran this trade were as ruthless as they were rich; their underpaid Asian crews often died on the job. In a sad testament to this, more than 900 bodies are buried at Broome's Japanese cemetery -- most drowned or contracted the bends. Bell notes ruefully that in "some years there was a 25 per cent fatality rate. Terrible, yes. If a white diver died there would be questions asked -- inquests, autopsies. But if a Japanese, Timorese or Chinese diver died, then you just hosed out the suit and put another guy into it. So I was fascinated by the kind of brutality and greed in that story and the interesting political situation."

She has set The White Divers of Broome amid the brothels, ballrooms and pearling boats of the frontier town, and describes how "the pearling masters were incredibly rich. There are amazing stories of [them] playing ten-pin bowls with Moet & Chandon champagne, and tipping barmaids with pearls -- misshapen pearls that weren't as valuable as the other ones. There was extraordinary excess and debauchery going on up there."

In adapting Bailey's book, Bell says she's "taken a lot of liberties". The written history lacked Asian and indigenous characters she could draw on, so she created her own. "They are such a critical part of the story you can't just refer to them [in passing] . . . On stage, if you don't see those people they don't count, in a way. You know, we don't feel anything for them."

Directed by Black Swan's artistic director Kate Cherry, the play has a cast of 14 -- which is lavish these days for a local drama. Visually ambitious, it includes underwater scenes in which performers fly across the stage in harnesses. Apart from its theatrical possibilities, Bell was drawn to the tale's ambiguous morality. She says that while reading Bailey's book, "you go 'Gosh, look at these white pearling masters who were the only ones to stand up to this racist government and insist on keeping their workers'. But then you turn a few pages and you realise why they wanted to keep their workers -- they were cheap and they were disposable -- so then you go, 'Oh God, how shameful!' "

She believes Aborigines, who were kidnapped and forced to dive for the white bosses before they were replaced with Asians, "were more brutalised than anyone else in this story . . . These pearlers used to go out on hunting parties with guns and blackbird Aboriginals from the desert and make them come and dive. They [the Aborigines] had never even seen anything bigger than a billabong before and they were forced [to dive] -- pregnant women, children, old people -- horrifying stories.

". . . It was maybe the most brutal and shameful aspect of our history and nobody knows about it. For that reason alone, I think it's important to talk about this story."

For Bell, 45, the theatre has long been a second home: she grew up witnessing the calculated mayhem of rehearsals and the cramped glamour of the dressing room while her well-known thespian parents, John Bell and Anna Volska, helped establish a distinctively Australian theatre. John Bell is still artistic director of the Bell Shakespeare Company, and one of our greatest Shakespearean actors. (His daughter has the flawless enunciation you might expect of the child of a gifted interpreter of the Bard.)

Exposed to the inner dynamics of the theatre since childhood, Bell sees herself as a collaborative theatremaker rather than a literary writer working in splendid isolation. She reckons making a play work is all about "the architecture . . . It's about creating a three-dimensional sculpture or structure that works in space and time, and the language, while important, is secondary to this." She reveals matter-of-factly that she slashed about 25 minutes from The White Divers and dropped two minor characters, following cast readings of the play.

This whatever-it-takes pragmatism contrasts dramatically with her purist approach to her vocation. At one point, she muses that "on a physiological level, it feels good to do it [write plays] and bad if too much time passes without having done it". In other words, for her, crafting plays is an almost physical need. Asked if she has ever become disillusioned with playwriting, she replies: "There have certainly been times when I've felt very frustrated. However, I have never considered giving up. First, because I can't do anything else. Second, because writing plays is how I connect with, and make sense of, the world. It's what I have to contribute."

For all her recent success, she feels there are fewer opportunities for local playwrights now -- especially for women -- than there were when she started writing plays in the mid-1980s. When asked if she thinks the theatre is a boys' club, she answers softly but firmly: "Yes it is. I think there are fewer [opportunities], especially for women. When I started out there was a concerted effort being made to encourage female voices in the theatre." Here, she mentions Playworks -- a now-defunct organisation funded to encourage female playwrights -- and the plays of Dorothy Hewett, Alma De Groen and Katherine Thomson.

In a low, incredulous voice, she continues: "I've gotta say it really frustrates me and breaks my heart that we're still having this conversation. Twenty years later, 25 years later, we're talking about qualities and we're talking about merit and why have things still not changed? There are certainly a lot more women writers, but as for whether or not they're getting more opportunities, I don't think it's all that different." She's on the board of and teaches a playwriting course at Sydney's Griffin Theatre and observes that the vast majority of her students are female: "There's this big gap between women writing their plays and getting productions and it's wrong . . . I don't get it. I just don't understand it."

Rather than sit around stewing, Bell has joined an independent company of mostly female playwrights called 7-On, that plans to stage plays in people's living rooms. She doesn't expect to make money, but is forging ahead "because we're sick of waiting for that letter or phone call that comes from the theatre company eight months later saying 'no thanks, we're not interested'. You can't just twiddle your thumbs, you've got to find a way to access an audience."

The dramatist will be accessing audiences on three continents this year. Alaska's Anchorage Opera will premiere Mrs President, for which Bell -- who lived in the US for nine years -- has written the libretto. Composed by American Victoria Bond, this work tracks the tumultuous life of feminist and one-time jailbird Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president in 1872, long before women could vote in America.

Victim Sidekick Boyfriend Me, Bell's play about teenagers who seek retribution following the suicide of a friend, is to be performed in Britain by 20 school and youth groups, and the best production will be staged at the National Theatre. "It's a wonderful thing for young people," she enthuses, "because the plays are written by experienced writers with them in mind. And it's wonderful for the playwrights because your play is getting 20 productions around the UK and will be published . . . Everybody wins."

She jokingly describes her forthcoming work, The Splinter, as "a kind of a gothic horror puppet show" inspired by Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. It's about a couple whose abducted child is returned to them. However, this joyous reunion is shadowed by uncertainty, as the child seems irrevocably changed. "A seed of doubt," explains Bell, "is planted in the father about the identity of this child, and he starts to wonder if it really is his daughter, or eventually, if she's really a human being."

This is not the first time Bell has used a child to excavate dark, unsettling themes. Wolf Lullaby (1996) focused on a child killer and asked whether individuals are born evil or become so. It was a hit at home and was picked up by Chicago's Steppenwolf theatre company and staged at New York's Atlantic Theatre. She was then offered a scholarship to attend the Juilliard School's playwrights' studio in New York, and ended up living in the States -- where she met and married her husband, American composer Phillip Johnston -- for almost a decade.

Bell has collaborated with Johnston on a score for the 1926 silent film, Faust, and is working with him again on a musical called Do Good and You Will Be Happy. It's had a workshop production and a CD is being made to present to potential producers. She is acutely aware that few homegrown musicals make it to the stage, but has an unwavering belief in the need to create local works: "If you don't create them and nurture them and support them, there'll be no classics for the future."

A winner of the Philip Parsons Young Playwrights' Award and an AWGIE for music theatre, she is refreshingly honest about the early career advantages of having famous parents. "I think it opened doors because people were curious to see if I had any talent, but I was also very leery of receiving special treatment. Ultimately though, I think it gave me a big head start."

But there was also a downside to belonging to a prominent theatre family. In the past, she has said she went to the US partly as an escape. She told one journalist: "I kept needing to prove to myself that I could be in a place where no one knew who they were and still make my way." But when we speak, she downplays this, saying she simply wanted to take up her scholarship: "I was 30 by that time, so I felt like I'd kind of proven myself."

She adds that it was "great fun" growing up and having actor parents. "My sister [actress Lucy] and I were at the theatre all the time, in the dressing rooms, behind the bar making disgusting soft-drink mixtures, backstage, occasionally on stage, and of course, in the audience: we saw everything at Nimrod, and elsewhere, from a very young age."

Today, Bell and Johnston split child-rearing and work 50-50, each understanding "there are times when you need to immerse yourself and not come up for air, and there are times when you want to be with the kids and not think about work". Bell also volunteers that "my family is really supportive". Lucy lives around the corner; their parents are not far away. One of the country's first families of the stage seems a closeknit bunch.

As she talks about her domestic life, one of Bell's cats is climbing up my legs while the other has scaled the tallest kitchen cupboards and settled into a cane basket on top of the fridge. Bell doesn't bat an eyelid: her household has a relaxed, bohemian vibe but also a thrifty quality -- there's a sunny, open living area but not much in the way of a garden, and the children ("both very creative") share a bedroom.

Bell wouldn't be surprised if Moss, 11, and Ivy, 8, went into the performing arts. "I encourage them and I try to be open-minded to the fact that there are other things that you can do out there," she says.

"[But] it's sort of like my family -- when it's the water that you swim in, it's very attractive and it's very natural."

The White Divers of Broome opens in Perth on January 28.