Last week I chatted to playwright Hannie Rayson. Hannie was in Tasmania last year as part of the Tamar Valley Writers Festival and is excited to be back playing at the Theatre Royal this week, with her show ‘Hello Beautiful’, a realisation of the same titled autobiography.
The show is a series of vignettes of Hannie’s life travelling and working around the world as a playwright. An added treat for audiences is that the show includes some stories not in the autobiography.
Hello Beautiful’s journey from page to theatre began as a book tour of three months and evolved into a dramatic adaptation by the Malthouse Theatre.
Hannie believes her career as a playwright was ‘cast’ pardon the pun early, when as the youngest child in the family she had to come up with innovative ways in a struggle for attention. One way of doing this was ‘flexing her mimicking skills’ at the kitchen table which in turn helped develop her talent with dialogue.
This production is interspersed with humour and poignancy as it follows Hannie’s career around the world including Hollywood. Hannie tells me she is delighted that her vignettes resonate with audiences, an example being a sort of ‘rant’ on boyfriends. Hannie says she wants to make a visit to her show a nourishing experience with a banquet of rich experiences to taste.
On the writing of dialogue Hannie reminds us of the difficulty of the process and suggests anyone to attempt to write down a conversation directly verbatim and reading it back and assessing how it sounds. Hanie suggests you would probably agree it needs some polishing, as dialogue requires an economy of words and pacing.
On the subject of pacing Hannie reminds us too of one of the writer’s woes, grappling over grammar illustrated by the quote of Oscar Wilde
‘I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.’ ~ Oscar Wilde ( http://www.quotegarden.com/grammar.html )
Hannie plays in ‘Hello beautiful’ at the Theatre Royal on Saturday 8 April at 7.30pm.
Paula Xiberras
