FIRST PRODUCTION

Così was first performed by Company B at the Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney on 21 April, 1992 with the following cast:

HENRY Bob Baines
JUSTIN, NICK, ZAC David Field
LUCY, JULIE Kerry Fox
CHERRY Celia Ireland
RUTH Elspeth MacTavish
LEWIS Ben Mendelsohn
ROY Barry Otto
DOUG David Wenham

Director, Adam Cook
Designer, Stephen Curtis
Lighting, Mark Shelton

CHARACTERS

LEWIS, 21, has just left university.
LUCY, 20-23, is doing an MA thesis and lives with Lewis.
NICK, 21-24, also doing a thesis and directs student productions.
JUSTIN, a social worker in his late 30s or early 40s. He is neat and precise.
ROY, 40-50, a mental patient who has spent much of his life in institutions.
HENRY, 40-50, a former lawyer who is now a patient. Like Roy, he has spent much of his
adult life in institutions.
DOUG, 20-30, has a liking for fires, but has not been in institutions very long.
CHERRY, 25-35, has been in institutions for some time.
JULIE, 21-25, is in a mental institution for the first time because of drug dependency.
RUTH, 30-40, an obsessive personality, who is in and out of mental institutions.
ZAC, 25-30, the musician of the group who has been in and out of mental institutions.

SETTING

The time is 1971. The play is set in a Melbourne mental institution.

To Gerri Williams and Adam Cook.
And, of course, Hilary Linstead—who was right all along.

Mozart was probably one of the sanest people who ever lived except for his preoccupation with scatology and his obsession that his wife may have been unfaithful to him.

Joseph Feher
The Problem of Constanze Mozart’s Fidelity

PLAYWRIGHT’S NOTE: TRIAL BY MADMEN

Written at probably one of the most intensely difficult periods of my life, Così is one of my most lighthearted plays. Each morning when I climbed the ladder to my South Melbourne attic I had never felt keener on entering the world of one of my plays. Like Summer of the Aliens, Così is partly autobiographical. Both centre on a character called Lewis (there, but for a vowel could be me). Summer of the Aliens was Lewis at fourteen, Così is Lewis at twenty-one. I suppose I chose those years because they were turning points in my understanding of people. Contrary to the opinions of those phrenologists of the twentieth century—the psychiatrists—it is sometimes events and experiences after your youth that determine the way you view the world, and so it was with my experiences that are part of Così.

Both my grandmothers ended up in mental institutions. On my mother’s side, Grandmother undoubtedly was suffering from a form of senility. Having always prided herself on her mental abilities (she could recite, in order, all the kings and queens of England) she found herself falling into the darkness of mental illness. When I visited her in Mont Park asylum she seemed to me to be the same person, but more discursive and mentally unfocussed. There is a current theory that far from being like a computer, the brain resembles a jungle. If this is so, then Grandmother’s brain became an inpenetrable jungle, swallowing up any explorer who dared to enter. On my father’s side my grandma deliberately chose madness as a way of dealing with the fact that her seventy-year-old husband had run off with a thirty-year-old barmaid. When I visited her in Mont Park (years after my other grandmother was in there) she lived permanently in the year 1948. As far as she was concerned, I did not exist, because I hadn’t been born yet and to complicate matters she thought I was my father. When she asked if I were to marry my mother, not only could I give the date, but I could tell her how many children I would have and so on. Some people would say that in having to pretend I was my father about to marry my mother I was taking part in a Freudian nightmare, but I prefer to see it as my having fallen, like Alice, down a hole to end up in topsy turvy land.