Cover Image: Catherine Moore and Matt Edgerton delve into the intimate, fractured connections at the heart of Speaking in Tongues. Photo supplied.

Lantana is one of the most remarkable films in Australian cinema history.

Our biggest hits and most beloved movies are earthy, empathetic comedies (Muriel’s Wedding, The Castle), campy romps (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge), pulsating action fantasies (the Mad Max movies), violent crime flicks (Chopper, Wolf Creek) and colourful kiddie entertainments (Babe, Peter Rabbit).

Lantana, on the other hand, is wrenching adult drama about a group of Sydney-siders caught up in a thicket of secrets and lies that is so beautifully written by Andrew Bovell and so sensitively directed by Ray Lawrence that it has overtaken the masterpieces of the 1970s such as Breaker Morant and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith to be the byword for quality Australian cinema (more amazingly, it sits at number 26 on the all-time Oz box office  between Young Einstein and Ladies in Black).

Such is the reputation of Lantana it is not surprising that when Black Swan chose to remount the 1996 play that inspired the movie, Speaking in Tongues, Bovell would take another look at it through the lens of his cherished multiple AFI Award winner.

“When I find myself giving notes to Humph [the play’s director Humphrey Bower] and the actors then realising I am talking about the version of the character in the film not as they are written in the play. So I have to shake it off and allow it to be a different beast,” Bovell tells me in the offices of Black Swan during a break in rehearsals.

“While the DNA of the film is in the play it became an entirely different thing. It was the same story, but it used another language. I changed genders, I changed plot points, I changed how the story ends. And there are a lot more characters in the film. They inhabit the same universe, but they are independent of each other,” explains Bovell.

“But it would make no sense to ignore the film entirely. Lantana was a wonderful experience and it means a lot to many people. And I learned about the characters doing the film. I’m sure Lantana has impacted on this new production of Speaking in Tongues, but not in overt ways.”

While Bovell is one of Australia’s most highly respected playwrights and screenwriters he’s not one of those old-school theatrical scribes who regard the job of the director and the actors to slavishly serve the text. He hands over the play to the director and the cast an is intrigued by what they bring to it.

“There is no definitive version of a play,” says Bovell. “Of course, you speak up when you believe a different choice would take it in a more interesting direction. But you also want to leave enough room so they can put their take on it. And I certainly don’t want them to follow something I did in the film,” says Bovell.

Nobody is more keenly aware of the transformation of material in varying version than Bovell. Speaking in Tongues is actually the third iteration of the material, with the two interlocking stories that make up the piece worked up from a 1992 one-act play titled Like Whiskey on the Breath of a Drunk You Love and the 1994 radio drama Distant Lights from Dark Places. 

In the first half of the play two couples who have abandoned their partners to meet for an illicit liaison without realising they’re hooking up with the other’s spouse. In the second half four similarly entangled characters are speaking to unseen people — “All unanswered calls for help,” writes Bovell in the stage directions — while the third part resolves the murder-mytery threading its way through.

Adding to the complexity and richness is the dialogue is not delivered in a straightforward fashion but is overlapping and fragmented, a polyphony that Bovell believes is both closer to how we experience information coming to us and shaking up the too-familiar way stories are told in the theatre.

“Speaking in Tongues was a significant play because it brought together a whole experiment around form that was occupying me as a younger writer,” says Bovell, 63, a graduate of the University of Western Australia who completed his education at the Victorian College of Dramatic Arts.

“At college I was writing short works, pieces that were all about cut-ups, repetition, narratives that would loop back to the beginning. And I was deeply influenced by cinema, especially Robert Altman, which would have multiple characters and not focus on the hero’s journey, which is the American model,” explains Bovell.

“Most of my plays are horizontal. It is about this set of people under this set of circumstances. And each person on that stage in that story has roughly equal weight, which embodies an ideological position about people being connected to each other as opposed to a singular force in control of their own destiny,” he says.

“Later I understood this as a left-wing position about the group being more important than the individual. But at the time I just found stories about groups of people far more interesting than the lone hero.”

Bovell traces his passion for dealing with multiple characters back to the English working class dramas such as Boys from the Blackstuff and the works of David Edgar and Mike Leigh.  

This was paired with its seeming opposite — experiment works in which a scene cuts to another without an obvious connection yet creates a new unexpected meaning and sparks an exploration of fate, coincidence and destiny. “I’ve got a good ear for the segue,” laughs Bovell.

While Bovell has gone on to write much more celebrated stage works over the past three decades — Holy Day (2001), When the Rain Stops Falling (2008), The Secret River (2013), Things I know to Be True (2016) — the fragmented, multi-character approach to storytelling that has come to characterise with Bovell was clearly being hammered out in Speaking in Tongues and why it is such a significant work in the Bovell oeuvre.

“Now that I am an older writer there is a body of work that smart minds can tell me about my work in a way that is illuminating for me,” says Bovell.

“There is a Bovellian approach to time, in which time is used as a dramatic tool. Or it provides a shape, as in Things I Know to Be True, which is a family broken up into four seasons with a focus on a different child for each season. It’s a shape I had in my mind even before I started to fill in the content,” he argues.

With Bovell’s expansive, multi-character style you would think that he would naturally segue into film and television. However, apart from his masterpieceLantana, Bovell has struggled to establish himself as a screenwriter, with his name listed amongst the writing credits of the thrillers Edge of Darkness (2010) and A Most Wanted Man (2014).

“To be an international screenwriter you have to be prepared for the fact that more things you write don’t get made than do get made. I have worked on some fabulous projects, such as adapting the classic novel Stoner. Casey Afleck was attached then his name came up in some harassment case and that is the end of it,” says Bovell.

Television is providing more fertile ground for Bovell, who says he is “up to his neck” developing projects, such as adapting his plays “Speaking in Tongues and Things I Know to Be True (with Nicole Kidman attached) and a Liane Moriarty novel.

“Years ago [producer] Bruna Panapdrea asked me to adapt Big Little Lies, which I turned down. It seemed at odds with what I do. That was a mistake considering its success. So when another Moriarty novel came to me I had to give it serious consideration,” laughs Bovell.

Bovell’s restlessness and desire not to repeat himself has in recent years sent him to Spain, where he wrote a play for Madrid’s Numero Uno collective dealing with the Pact of Forgetting, an informal agreement between all sides of politics in the wake of General Franco’s death to ensure the country’s stability.

The company had put on productions of When the Rain Stops Falling and Things I Know to Be True, which so was enthusiastically embraced by Spanish audiences that it led to Bovell workshopping and writing the Pact of Forgetting play, Song of First Desire.

“It has been an extraordinary experience,” says Bovell, “but contentious. The play divided people. One group said, ‘Only an outsider could dare to tell this story.’ Another group said, ‘How could an outsider dare to tell this story, to begin to broach the sensitivities around this issue’. 


“But I did it in collaboration with my Spanish cast. I asked them to tell me stories about their grandparents. We created a landscape of ideas and themes. I asked them what they were most afraid to make a play about. This is the play they were most afraid to do.”

Speaking in Tongues is on at the Heath Ledger Theatre from August 23 to September 14.