It may be called The Platypus, but don’t expect too much content about this curious and distinctly Australian creature in Francis Greenslade’s play.
The Platypus uses the peculiar Australian mammal more as a metaphor, really. The platypus is a strange creature. It’s composed of odds and ends, as though evolution got tired one afternoon and stopped paying attention to what it was doing. It seems wrong, strangely put together, a curiosity – just like this play about the messy end of a relationship.
Written and directed by Francis Greenslade, well known as an actor as well as a writer, (Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell, Winners and Losers) and performed by John Leary (The Good Place, Glitch, The Letdown, Upper Middle Bogan) and Rebecca Bower (The Spooky Files, Offspring, Wentworth), The Platypus is a genre-busting delight — an outrageously clever, wildly entertaining play about theatre, relationships and the roles we all play.
“There’s a bit of Shakespeare, a bit of Oscar Wilde and even some Sondheim-inspired musical theatre,” Greenslade says. “It reflects the struggles of a very recognisable family, with plenty of Easter eggs for theatre nerds thrown in.”
So there’s a platypus, too? One asks the question hoping there might be.
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“Yes, but lovers of monotremes will be slightly disappointed,” Greenslade says. “There is a platypus that appears to signify that, like that creature, this play is made up of different elements.”
Greenslade says rumours of him being a playwright may be slightly exaggerated.
“I’m not really a playwright,” he says as we discuss the play that contradicts that self-deprecation. “But I have had this one in my head for a long time. We were doing Shakespeare in Love at MTC (Melbourne Theatre Company) and during that I sat in my hotel room and put it all down in three days.”
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It’s a two-act play that goes behind the veil of a heterosexual relationship to explore how a couple who are working and raising a young child handle the “seven-year itch”.
a story told using various modes and genres with a bit of Shakespeare and musical theatre in the mix
In the domestic setting of a kitchen, Jessica and Richard are going through the morning routine of getting themselves ready for work and Jack, their son, ready for school. It’s clear from the outset that trouble is brewing in the relationship. What follows is a story told using various modes and genres, with a bit of Shakespeare and musical theatre in the mix.
While Greenslade is happily married to his partner, Louise, and they have three children, he says “you can’t be married for more than 20 years without there being some friction”.
The play has been performed in Adelaide and Melbourne and when his three kids went to see it Greenslade says they recognised some of the dialogue. As he said, the idea for the play was with him for some time and if he had done it sooner, he may have starred in it himself.
“I unconsciously wrote it for me, but I’m too old now,” he muses. If you consider 62 too old.
“It’s a universal story that I’ve tried to tell in a strange way in a play where you don’t know what will happen next.”
But just to be clear, no platypuses were harmed in creating this production and the platypus involved is treated “with great respect”.
The Platypus plays the Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, September 10-13.