Playwright Patricia Cornelius on truth, reading reviews, and why small theatre companies are struggling to survive

Playwright Patricia Cornelius, 73, on how she deals with reviews and why she hopes people are frightened of her.

Patricia Cornelius’s new play Truth delves into the life of Julian Assange and will be at the Malthouse Theatre 13 Feb - 8 March.

The stories that interest me the most … are the ones that get bigger than Ben-Hur and enter the consciousness of a whole nation. Those stories I find completely compelling and I’m interested in pursuing them sometimes in an imaginative way – or in the case of my new work, Truth, about real people like Julian Assange. It’s been the hardest one I’ve ever worked on. I don’t really write about real people and don’t have to honour the stories in quite the way I feel like you have to with real people. Sometimes, it dramatically doesn’t necessary lend itself to exciting writing. So to find a way that is still lively but true to what happened has been challenging.

For a long time I wanted to be … an actor. I had no idea really what I was doing but I did this fantastic course at Rusden State College when I was a young person and I fell in love with the idea of being an actor. But that morphed pretty quickly into writing. I was too anxious as an actor.

The thing that is most forgotten about theatre and its role in society is … that it’s about drama. Yes you can have comedy and you can have all sorts of feel good moments within it, but you need the kind of old fashioned, direct, dramatic impact and you need to make people anxious about the world to make them rethink it. I don’t necessarily pretend to think that it’s going to change anything in particular. There’s that really beautiful Baldwin quote that talks about having just a millimetre of effect on an audience or a reader: that in itself is significant.

I deal with reviews by … reading them. Sometimes they lead to tears and other times, I read them and think “Oh my God, is that what I meant?” They can be very insightful. It sort of sounds stupid to be worried about what reviews say about my work but when you work mostly in the independent sector you are so reliant on them. I sometimes think “do not do me in because your personal taste is not being met”. But at the same time, sometimes you need a brushing.

I’ve heard that people find me frightening … but I think I’m lovely. I suppose it’s because I write about tough things and so in some ways that gets interpreted as me being heavy handed with the world. I hope they’re still afraid of me, whoever they are.

My spare time often consists of … a big glass of wine.

The advice I would give my younger self is … own the good things that you’ve done. Women tend to think we’re never quite good enough.

It’s ridiculous that the world gets represented … in this weird middle-class bubble. It doesn’t exist. Class has always been the thing that has driven me, both as a political person and an artist. I’m interested in talking about an under class and a working class not just a middle class. There’s a kind of purposefulness in that creatively, there is a lot of tension. There’s a lot of drama to be had. And I don’t mean sentimental crap, I mean drama about how one is treated.

These days … I’m so appalled about how difficult it is for small theatre companies to survive, there is no trajectory for them. Funding bodies have absolutely let the independent sector down and it’s f. ing miserable. Without funding it’s too tough, way too tough for them and it’s a lie to think we don’t need them.

Patricia Cornelius’ latest work Truthpremieres at Malthouse Theatre on February 13.