Sometimes, says playwright Patricia Cornelius, would-be audience members can't even bring themselves to speak the name of one of her best-known plays.
"We had great fun at the initial season of Shit in Melbourne," she says. "Lovely people would ring up and ask for two tickets for . . . then they would whisper . . . S-H-I-T. I had to laugh because if they can't say 'shit' how are they going to deal with all the f---s and c---s in the play?"
![Playwright Patricia Cornelius, in her home in Thornbury, during the lead-up to a production of her play SHIT at the ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170726135251im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/b/i/3/l/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gx8383.png/1500710511151.jpg)
Even Cornelius admits to finding Susie Dee's production of Shit, which had a brief but acclaimed season at the Sydney Festival in January this year and is being revived at the Seymour Centre this week, confronting stuff. "Sometimes the actors shock me and I wrote the bloody thing!" she says with a laugh.
"The anger is so in your face and there is a wonderful irreverence from the women," Cornelius says. "When [actor] Nicci Wilks sits there with her legs apart at the beginning of the play, my first impulse is, oh my god, close your legs! It's something my mother might say. But she is like, I don't give a f---. It's so them-against-the-world."
![The cast of Shit (from left): Peta Brady (Sam), Nicci Wilks (Billy) and Sarah Ward (Bobby).](http://web.archive.org./web/20170726135251im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/t/q/u/z/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gx8383.png/1500710511151.jpg)
The three incarcerated underclass women of Shit are rarities on theatre stages, as are many of the characters Cornelius has created over the course of her career, in plays such as Savages (produced at the Eternity Playhouse in 2014), Slut (revived recently at the Old Fitzroy), and in Who's Afraid of the Working Class?, a work she co-wrote with Andrew Bovell, Irine Vela, Christos Tsiolkas and Melissa Reeves for the Melbourne Workers Theatre in the late 1990s.
There's nothing romantic in her characters' rebellious stance or outsider mindsets, Cornelius says. "The us-against-the-world thing doesn't necessarily go well for these people. But there is something really admirable about the fight in them, about the struggle to not succumb to what everyone thinks they should be or how they should behave.
"I think women, particularly, relate to that," Cornelius adds. "I never want to write a moment in a play where a woman succumbs to coquettishness or is sexualised in any way, or has to be grateful, or apologetic, or is there just to serve some male protagonist. For women, being grateful all the time is so exhausting."
Cornelius, 64, is one of the most awarded playwrights in the country. Her 2005 play Love won the Wal Cherry Award. She collected the Patrick White Playwrights' Award and the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Drama for Do Not Go Gentle. She has Australian Writers Guild Awards and a couple of Louis Esson Prizes, too.
Yet Cornelius' plays are largely ignored by state theatre companies. Belvoir staged her two-hander Love a decade ago in its small Downstairs Theatre. The Call, a play inspired by the story of the Muslim convert and ill-starred adventurer David Hicks was staged at Griffin Theatre in 2009. Savages first saw the light of day in the small independent space 45downstairs in Melbourne in 2013. Despite winning the NSW Premier's Award, Do Not Go Gentle has yet to be staged in Sydney.
Brett Sheehy, artistic director of Melbourne Theatre Company, believes mainstage recognition and programming is "long overdue" for Cornelius.
"I can't speak for the other artistic directors as to why they haven't staged Patricia's work already, but I know each of them would be considering whether her work is commercial, and also the toughness of her work," Sheehy says.
"Patricia's work is uncompromising. It is always political. She doesn't give you a bourgeois divertissement of an evening. She absolutely grips your mind and your heart and doesn't let it go until the end. Everything she writes is important and needs saying. You can't say that about all the storytellers of Australia, that what they are telling needs to be told. But that is certainly the case with Patricia."
Sheehy is sitting on a completed commissioned by the MTC from Cornelius. A staging is yet to be announced. He also has another commission under way, part of the MTC's Next Stage Writers' Program, a new five-year, $4.6 million program funded entirely by philanthropic donations. It is possible one or both of these commissions might lead to a co-production with a theatre company in Sydney.
"It's always wonderful to have the play you want to write next already paid for," says Cornelius.
Cornelius is also under commission at the State Theatre Company of South Australia, and Melbourne's Theatre Works is producing the premiere of her play Big Heart in September, again directed by Susie Dee, with whom Cornelius has maintained a 30-year working relationship.
Cornelius regards herself as lucky, in that she has been able to write the work she feels important to her rather than fulfill the briefs of others.
"There is always a price when you write what you want," she says. "Maybe that's part of the difficulty I've had being picked up by mainstream. But I may as well stick to my guns now I'm getting older. I don't know any alternative."
Cornelius happily admits to not really knowing what "the mainstream" wants in a play. "I never think like that anyway," she says. "It would be nonsense. I can only write about whatever sticks in my craw. It might be some weird incident or something I've eavesdropped and can build a story around."
The main thing for a play, Cornelius says, is that it must provoke. "I like things that aggravate," she says. "I love it when I go to the theatre and see an idea expressed that contests everything I believe, when there is potential for an alteration in my thinking."
And there's too little of it in our theatres, Cornelius adds.
"I don't think we aggravate enough in Australia. There is a passion for entertainment and diversion. But who wants that all the time? What does it even mean? I think entertainment is a dirty word. I don't ever want to see a middle class dinner party on stage again."
Cornelius' theatre roots stretch back to her college days in the 1970s.
"I went to Rusden State College [in Melbourne] and I discovered drama there as a young woman," she says. "I wanted to be an actor but I found it excruciating. So instead, I decided to write for a voice I felt was under-represented, even though I wasn't quite as articulate at that time."
Political awareness combined with the development of her writing voice came with her involvement in the Melbourne Workers Theatre, which she co-founded. "I committed to them for 15 years or more," she says. "There wasn't a voice in the theatre for me at that time, not in terms of gender, not in terms of class. That's when I realised how appalling gender, class and cultural representation was in the theatre."
For the most part, it remains appalling, Cornelius says, as if our theatre companies have been wearing blinkers for decades. "Look at our streets. They are filled with people sleeping out, people who are disenfranchised and detested. Look at all the women in their 60s living in their cars. The theatre ignores all that stuff. What is going on? Why don't we address the stuff that is in our face?"
Is it that the theatre companies think audiences will steer clear of these stories?
No, says Cornelius. "Even the bourgeoisie audience has a taste for it. They can handle more these days and I think they want to. But there is a real anxiety about new Australian work and it's entrenched. There is an anxiety about us, the playwrights, that we are not good enough. It drives me nuts."
The Australian fantasy of classlessness also comes into play. "England is full of fantastic plays that deal with class but we pretend we are classless and that we are not complex and varied in our outlooks," Cornelius says. "But all that stuff is there and it's terrific fodder for writing. I mean, who wants to go to a theatre and come out thinking, 'oh, that was lovely, that's how I think exactly'. People want to experience tension."
Shit is about as far away from the polite drawing room play as you can get. The play's title pretty much describes the past lives and future prospects of its three women: Billy (Nicci Wilks), Bobby (Sarah Ward) and Sam (Peta Brady). All share traumatic pasts. All have been involved in a violent incident for which no one seems sorry or remorseful.
"These are women who defy pity or any kind of nostalgic view of the poor bugger underclass," Cornelius says. "They are shockingly out there. They are violent, they are ugly, they are shit. They know it and the world knows it. But they have this extraordinary power in their adversity to make us feel uncomfortable."
SHIT plays at the Seymour Centre until July 29.