Cover

Title Page

Playwright’s Biography

Playwright’s Biography

Daniel Keene’s plays have been produced widely throughout Australia and he is one of Australia’s most internationally performed playwrights. During the thirty years in which he has written for the theatre, his plays have earned critical praise and sell-out seasons in theatres and at festivals in Australia, China, the United States and across Europe, especially in France, where more than eighty productions of his plays have been presented since 2000. His plays, which include All Souls, Half and Half, The Serpent’s Teeth, Silent Partner, Low, Terminus, The Architect’s Walk, The Ninth Moon and Life Without Me have received numerous literary awards, including the NSW Premier’s Prize for literature three times, and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Literature twice. His groundbreaking and critically acclaimed collaboration with director Ariette Taylor – the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project (1997–2002) – was a major event in Australian theatre culture.

All goes unanswered, love is unanswered, out of the dark

A tongue without speech, a hand without touch, a crude potter’s thumb,

Grooves us a moment, the Esperanto of sense

Jabbers our language, all that we hold in common.

Yet wings make grubs articulate, cocoons are spun for shattering,

And though you keep your hand over my mouth,

I will keep on singing, dry cicada under the spring.

Dorothy Hewett

from Unanswered Love Letter

First Production Details

FIRST PRODUCTION DETAILS

Mother was first produced by If Theatre at the Gasworks Arts Park, Melbourne, on 5 June 2015, with the following cast:

Director, Matt Scholten

Set, Costume and Props Designer, Kat Chan

Lighting Designer, Tom Willis

Sound Designer, Darius Kedros

Stage and Tour Manager, Ainsley Kerr

Character / Setting

CHARACTER

CHRISTIE

She is about sixty years old. Her hair is long and unkempt. She wears a ragged, floral patterned dress that reaches to the ground. Her feet are bare, almost black with dirt.

SETTING

Various locations on the outskirts of a large city.

Mother

ONE

CHRISTIE picking through rubbish on a block of vacant ground

Crows calling

Bruised sky

Rust and rot

yes

that night when Lenny come home he smelt the drink on my lips

he said what’s that

he knew what that was

how many times do I have to tell you he said

he’d told me a hundred thousand times

I don’t know I said how many times

you promised you wouldn’t he said

I know I did I said

what good’s your promises he said you addled bitch

I’m not addled I said I’m as good as gold

funny he said you’re funny

I’m not trying to be I said

I was often funny when I wasn’t trying to be as far as Lenny was concerned

you don’t know what’s funny and what’s not he said

I know more than you think I know I said