Louis Nowra talks The Lewis Trilogy and how his muse - inner-city Sydney - has changed
Playwright Louis Nowra on the role of gentrification in his beloved Kings Cross, working with Brian Cox, and sitting through five hours of live theatre.
Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company will perform the Lewis Trilogy, three of your old plays – Summer of the Aliens, Cosi and This Much is True – back to back. Do audience members get a medal, or at least a T-shirt, if they make it through? Ha! No but you do get an Indian dinner between the second and the third. It is very ambitious. We’ve slimmed down the three plays to 90 minutes each.
They were written over the course of 25 years. Is there a common theme? One is set in a housing commission estate, where Lewis [the main character] grew up, another in an asylum, where he directed an opera, and the third in the Old Fitzroy pub in Woolloomooloo, with all these crazy houso people. None were part of the mainstream. They had a different morality and a different way of viewing life, but everyone accepted one another. The other common theme was love, and how Lewis was changed by these encounters.
How did you feel rereading these plays written long ago? I was quite pleased because often when Australians write about the underclass there’s always a bit of condescension, and that wasn’t the case. Many writers find it hard to see these people as real people. I watched Boy Swallows Universe recently with my wife Mandy [author Mandy Sayer] and that was the thing that impressed us about it, that these characters living on the edge were fully formed.
Your muse has always been the gritty inner-Sydney around Kings Cross, where you’ve lived for decades. Are you concerned this world is disappearing through gentrification? I met a young doctor recently who works near here, and he refuses to go down into the housing estate because he’s scared. The rich are scared of the poor because they simply don’t encounter them. There are kids growing up in Potts Point who never encounter any roughness, or any poor people, and I really think they are missing out.
Do you have friends there? Many, and I have known them for years. I was friends with a meth chemist called Chemical John, who was said to be the best meth chemist in Australia. I put on This Much is True in 2017 and I invited many of the people, who were characters. Chemical John had died by this stage but his ashes were on the piano.
Do the two worlds – your theatre world and your mates at Woolloomooloo – ever mix? Russell Crowe read my book on Woolloomooloo – he lives in the flash part of the suburb, on the harbour – and he thought some of the characters were a bit far-fetched. I invited him for a drink with a few of them down at the Old Fitzroy and when they left he said: “Wow, you were spot on.”
You wrote the series The Straits, starring Brian Cox as a gangster in the Torres Strait. What was he like? We got on well and he really liked my wife, Mandy. We were up in Queensland for the filming because our chihuahua Coco was one of the stars of the show. I think Brian liked how casual Australian crews were, that it wasn’t so hierarchical. We talked a lot about our rough childhoods. When he was 13 or 14 he got a job as a cleaner in a theatre and when he saw people acting he saw a way out of the slums.
How did Coco enjoy it? She loved it. She was cuddled all the time and there was the food wagon and she would eat and eat. We had to put her on a diet after the filming. And she loved sitting up on Brian’s big belly.
The Lewis Trilogy opens at the Griffin Theatre on February 9
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