Did you think "Shirley" as I did when I read the name "Valentine"? Remember the housewife who breaks out of domestic boredom, goes on a permanent holiday to Greece and resumes her maiden name? Her British suburban husband Mr Bradshaw comes to find her to take her home, but passes without recognising his wife, at her table outside the taverna at the edge of the sea. "I'm Shirley Valentine. I'll never be Shirley Bradshaw again."
I didn't ask Alana Valentine the origin of her name. She is certainly not fictional, but like Willy Russell's Shirley, this Valentine seeks what she calls "magical reality". Not on a Greek island, however enticing that may be, but through her writing - short stories, poetry, drama for radio, television, film and especially for the stage. Living in inner-Sydney Redfern, her grandfather a fervent supporter of the Rabbitohs, Valentine didn't wait or deny herself like Shirley, but started young with a BA Communications at UTS in 1982, became a script editor for Grundy Television, wrote some 16 ABC radio programs, 5 film scripts, speeches for Judi Connelli and Max Gillies, 18 playscripts, gained a Grad Dip in Museum Studies (with Merit) at Sydney University in 2001 and in 2004 wrote Episode 89 of McLeod's Daughters, for Millenium Television.
Rather surprised, I wondered why McLeod's Daughters? After all I remembered Mary Rachel Brown's very affecting performance of Valentine's Radio Silence under the vast wings of G for George at the Australian War Memorial soon after Episode 89 appeared. Did Valentine need the money? No, it wasn't the money. It was to learn the craft of writing to a strict formula with the characters and their way of speaking and acting already decided. You need this, she explained, to get more work as a television writer.
But what about the sentimentality? I asked. We discussed craft and content, sentiment rather than sentimental, practicality and the writer's voice, theatre and community - her "magical reality". What about her current Canberra play, Butterfly Dandy? Her $20,000 grant from the NSW Ministry for the Arts researching and writing a verbatim theatre piece Parramatta Girls, for Belvoir Street's Company B, about the Parramatta Girls Home and its past residents? Or Run Rabbit Run retelling South's Rugby League fight for survival, or Savage Grace about a deeply religious man who falls in love with a younger man, "drawn together by sexual passion and driven apart by professional ethics"? The accolades are there from a NSW Premier's Literary Award in 1989, through a Shakespeare Globe Theatre Writer's Fellowship, a Rodney Seaborn Playwrights' Award, an AWGIE from the Australian Writers' Guild, a Churchill Fellowship, an Australian National Playwrights' Centre Award. I felt exhausted just talking to her.
Writing to a formula is not Valentine's style. "Each play is a puzzle to solve. You solve that puzzle in a different way," she says. The text is "just one more brush" to add to set, costume, lights and all the other theatrical devices. She might begin writing with an idea like exploring euthanasia (in Savage Grace), or material from a commission like cross-dressing women performers of 1900 (researched by Julie McElhone who performs in Butterfly Dandy), or making a museum exhibit come alive (in The Prospectors, originally for the Australian National Maritime Museum). Then she has to find the drama in a character, pair or group who have to face up to a problem and, in trying to solve it, come to a different understanding of themselves. And they need to be in Australia because that connects them to our community.
The prospectors of the Gold Rush exhibit are an experienced Californian miner and a young Australian new-chum who gets taken up in the Eureka Stockade, against the American's advice. Designed for 13 year-olds, the play is about friendship: "Do I do those things because my friend does it?" Or should I not follow my American friend's opinions?
In Butterfly Dandy, based on real-life women performers' experiences, Valentine's character Mirabella Martin is talked into performing in a man's costume because it is the 1905 fashion, though she has to struggle with her feelings to do it. But with her stage success, she finds her feelings change from limited to liberated woman - with significant resonances for us in 2005. This is not only a "delightful and very funny cabaret" but has been written strictly in the tradition of the Women on a Shoestring Theatre Company. It is a perfect example of Valentine's central diamond of reality in a magical theatrical setting. Her art is to make the magic reveal the reality to which we all can respond.
In doing so, Valentine also shows the way for new Australian theatre, drawing audiences like South's Rugby fans to the theatre and into a sense of community. Live theatre is certainly not dead, according to this Valentine, and it's even better than escape to a Greek island.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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