by Andrew Bovell

For playwright Andrew Bovell, the road leading to Speaking in Tongues was as labyrinthine and unexpected as the play itself.

Speaking in Tongues was written in 1996 but its genesis lay in earlier experiments with form. It began in 1992 when the Melbourne theatre group Five Dollar Theatre Company commissioned me to write a short piece for a season of plays entitled "Suitcases in a Thousand Room Hotel." The resulting piece, Like Whiskey on the Breath of a Drunk You Love, used various theatrical techniques such as split scenes and simultaneous dialogue. Although it was a fairly tongue-in-cheek take on the game of seduction and the pitfalls of marriage, I sensed that something of more substance lay at its core. The four characters (two married couples: Leon and Sonja, and Jane and Pete) shared an undefined yearning I didn’t attempt to make explicit. I was happy to let it sit beneath the surface with the idea that somewhere down the track I would come back and explore it more deeply.

Later I was commissioned by another Melbourne theatre group called Chameleon to write a short play for their season (entitled "Tidal Wave"). Distant Lights From Dark Places, as the piece was called, was first performed at La Mama in Melbourne in 1994. It explores a chain of connection between four isolated figures, Valerie, Sarah, Nick and Neil. Although much darker in tone and a more sophisticated piece of writing than Whiskey, it also used parallel narrative, split scenes and simultaneous dialogue. I also experimented with fragmenting language and created a kind of shared dream landscape between the four characters. (Later I adapted this piece for radio and it won the gold medal for Drama at the 1997 New York Radio and Television Festival.)

Companies like Chameleon and Five Dollar formed the bedrock of theatre practice in Melbourne in the early 1990s. They provided an arena for writers, directors and performers to experiment with form. In both these early pieces, I was experimenting with formal ideas that would take my writing beyond naturalism to reveal the shape of human experience as I was observing it. I was able to consolidate these ideas through my association with Ros Horin and the Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney.

For me, Speaking in Tongues reveals something about the moral weakness to which we are all susceptible simply by virtue of being human.

Ros had directed Whiskey in a season of short plays at the Stables Theatre in 1992. Sometime after that she approached me with the idea of doing a season of Whiskey and Distant Lights and commissioning a third piece to accompany them. Instead, I suggested writing a full-length play to bring the two short ones together. And so the idea for Speaking in Tongues was born.

On the surface the two plays had little in common. They were stylistically different and tonally at odds, yet the characters in both plays shared the same sense of yearning. They were all searching for a sense of clarification in their emotional lives. From the outset I made the decision not to attempt to make the pieces similar but to incorporate their differences, believing that this could create an unexpected and surprising dramatic structure.

First I went back to Leon, Sonja, Jane and Pete. Whiskey—or a version of it —became the first two scenes of Speaking in Tongues. I then followed their lives beyond the rigid parameters set down in the original piece. In effect I was able to explore the consequences of what had taken place. I was able to play out the yearning beneath the surface in Whiskey. As a structural principle I used the theatrical conceit in which each character encounters the others. This gave it a satisfying sense of completion.

Distant Lights remained virtually unchanged and forms the central part of Speaking in Tongues. The challenge was to make the connection between the two pieces more explicit. Taking two characters from Whiskey (Leon and Jane) and having them witness crucial events played out or alluded to in Distant Lights achieved this. Leon and Jane were able to make further sense of their own lives while also allowing me to set up what was to come in the drama. From this point on, the destinies of all eight characters were linked and this sense of interconnection between disparate people emerged as a strong theme in the work.

Speaking in Tongues is like a tightly woven piece of fabric: Take any two strands and follow them and you will end up in quite different places.

For the third and final act, I took Leon from Whiskey and brought him into the world of Distant Lights by making him the policeman who was investigating Valerie’s disappearance. In the earlier play Valerie’s story is told through a series of phone messages she leaves for her husband John. While writing it I had often wondered what it would be like for a man to come home to discover those messages, given that his wife disappeared on that night. Speaking in Tongues gave me an opportunity to tell John’s story. He became the ninth character in the play and unexpectedly provided the denouement; his final revelation in the play is disturbing and reverberates back through the play. For me, it reveals something about the moral weakness to which we are all susceptible simply by virtue of being human. The tragic consequences of such weaknesses are what this story is about.

At the time of writing the play I was interested in finding new narrative shapes in the theatre. I wanted to work on a lateral plane rather than a linear one. I was interested in the random connections between people and how we made sense of our own lives by encountering the lives of others. I was influenced by the multi-narrative forms I had seen in the screen work of Robert Altman and, later, in films such as Todd Solondz’s Happiness and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with narrative that focused on the journey of a single protagonist and theatre that sat within a single stylistic form. I had a huge appetite for story and no longer felt sated with a singular view but sought out work that attempted a broader coverage of human experience.

Speaking in Tongues is an emotional labyrinth. It’s like a tightly woven piece of fabric: Take any two strands and follow them and you will end up in quite different places. I find that this shape allows me to understand the world in which I live, in a way that the carefully plotted line of cause and effect found in naturalism no longer does. But quite beyond all my thoughts about form, shape and structure, I really just set out to tell a compelling and haunting story about human fallibility.

Speaking in Tongues was first performed at the Stables Theatre in Sydney in September 1996. It went on to tour nationally in 1998 before finding its way to director Mark Clements in England. Anyone writing in the English language hopes that their work will reach beyond the limits of their own culture. But Australia is a long way from Europe and America. It is difficult to make connections across this vast distance. I owe a great debt to Mark for his faith in this play and for bringing it first to an English audience and now to New York. I never envisaged that my work would ever be seen there. The City has always occupied a certain place in my imagination, as it does in the imagination of many writers. Just the thought of coming to New York fills me with a renewed sense of vigor.

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