An Interrupted Tragedy

Chris Aronsten's new comedy, The Lunch Hour, takes as its premise a gaggle of co-workers writing a play about their unpopular boss in an attempt to win a playwriting competition. Their boss is also writing a play, one about the dysfunctional staff he watches over. It seems all the world's a stage, or at least it is in this slice of nine-to-five, and every worker's a writer. They say you should write what you know, and this office-space opus definitely has a dose of the autobiographical.

The director for The Lunch Hour, Kate Gaul, brought Aronsten's previous work, Human Resources, to life on stage in 2006, though their relationship – recreational and professional – extends back even further, and has a setting not dissimilar to that of Aronsten's latest script. “Around about 1998, 1999, something like that, we met working in a call centre – it was actually a theatrical box office,” Gaul recalls, “I'm not going to tell you which one – but we did then work together in a number of different box offices, different arts organisations and I guess playwrights and directors find themselves attracted to each other, so that's how it all started. I found with a lot of those little part-time jobs I made very strong professional relationships, but also quite strong friendships as well. I never underestimate any sort of situation you're in. I guess that's the lesson to take away from that.”

It's good advice, it seems, as Gaul clearly likes the challenge of Aronsten's work, and their prior collaborations allow her a special insight into this new play – its perils and potential. “It's a very ambitious play – a full-length play in two acts. It plays with form quite significantly; it's a black comedy – and comedy is a very unusual genre in new Australian writing – and it's got lots of good theatrical challenges for me as the director in terms of how the scenes are composed, and what it would look like, and how to actually achieve it.

“He has sophisticated use of language, themes of control and isolation, his theatricality and sense of theatre – it's so witty – and I find his world view is quite shocking, but there is a lot of humanity in there as well. The use of time as well, wordplay, the use of repetition, the tempo and the punctuation of every scene is quite rhythmic in the writing, and it can be quite hard to embody those on stage as you're trying to figure out who these people are, so it's a nice challenge for the director to be challenging the process between what they can see in the script and what the three-dimensional actor brings to it.”

The autobiographical – the struggles of the artist – again rears its head when you get to the heart of the play, the odd comedy that so appealed to Gaul: “A comedy is an interrupted tragedy,” she reasons “Everybody in the play is yearning to achieve something – in this case in their artistic life – but there are lots and lots of obstacles that they have to overcome. The comedy comes out of the ways they try to overcome their obstacles and how they are thwarted and essentially then the human frailty that just gets in the way basically of people achieving their dreams.”