Director Daniel Lammin was around 20 years old and studying in Melbourne when he first read playwright Tommy Murphy’s Strangers in Between. Picking up a copy that collected it with Murphy’s adaptation of Timothy Conigrave’s seminal HIV/AIDS memoir, Holding the Man (Murphy would go on to write the film version too), it was to have a profound affect on him.
“I read Holding the Man and loved it, so I thought, ‘well, I’ve got nothing else to do, so I might as well read Strangers in Between,’ and I fell completely in love with it and knew I wanted to direct it, even though I didn’t know I was going to be a director yet,” Lammin says.
Flash forward and Lammin now has his wish, directing a new production that will be staged as part of Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival before heading up to Sydney for the 40th anniversary of Mardi Gras, a fitting homecoming of sorts.
Will King stars as teenager Shane, who flees the small NSW country town of Goulburn for the neon lights of Sydney’s Kings Cross - pre-lockout laws - and depicts his fledgling attempts to find himself and his queer family.
Lammin recognised some of that struggle. Born in Sydney, his family moved to a remote sugar cane and cattle farm outside the small Queensland town of Gin Gin when he was nine years old, “so it’s like proper middle of nowhere,” he chuckles.
“When I was in the country, I didn’t know I was gay, so I didn’t have the experience of being gay in a little country town, but I did have the experience of feeling different,” Lammin says. “And then I had the anxieties of adjusting to life in the city again when I moved to Melbourne to study. It was too loud and crowed and overwhelming.”
Strangers in Between also stars Helpmann Award-winner Guy Simon as the “very Surry Hills” 20-something Will and AACTA-winner Simon Burke as Peter, an older man caring for his dying mother. Lammin is drawn to the play’s inter-generational exploration of masculinity, morality and queer identity.
“There is a tendency in the gay male community to forget your elders, those that came before, because so much of it is based on looks and sex appeal and all that crap that it’s easy for the younger generations to ignore and act as if the older generations don’t exist,” he says.
40 years on from the first Mardi Gras protest, honouring our elders is vitally important, Lammin argues, and that’s a vital part of Murphy’s play. “It’s interesting comparing the way that Peter interacts with his community with the way that that Will does.”
Director Daniel Hammin Source: Supplied
Though Burke was not in the original Griffin Theatre production in 2005, he was a part of the workshops that led up to it, and contributed his fair share of the off-the-cuff lines. Lammin says he brings with him a wealth of experience setting the time and place for the cast and crew.
“He’s been able to help concoct for us exactly the world that we’re trying to portray,” Lammin says. “Guy is fabulous too, but I think that the real secret weapon of the show is Will. He’s only 21 and basically never leaves the stage. It’s the biggest challenge he’s ever had, but he’s taking it very seriously and doing an incredible job with Simon and Guy’s support.”
Re-reading the play it in the midst of the postal survey on marriage equality was further illuminating for Lammin. “All of a sudden there were all these things that I had never noticed in the play before, like the concept of family and that queer people, in a lot of cases, have to recreate a family because their own family unit isn’t doing the job it should.”
He was also struck, once more, by Murphy’s dialogue. “Tommy captures colloquialisms and rhythms and timbre really beautifully, so that every character feels very distinct,” Lammin says. “He basically became one of my favourite writers instantly. I was reading the words of these characters and thinking, ‘I know these people’.”
What Strangers in Between isn’t is a coming out play. “It happened at that weird moment where those narratives were starting to slip. It was before [Andrew Haigh film] Weekend, where all of a sudden there were other narratives to talk about in terms of the queer experience. It’s more about watching a teenager embrace their sexuality, as opposed to discover it.”
See Strangers in Between at Midsumma Festival Jan 24 – Feb 11, or at Mardi Gras Feb 14 - March 2.
