Jasper Jones: A note from playwright Kate Mulvany
The award-winning playwright, actor and screenwriter on adapting a best-selling novel for the stage.
It’s a rare gift as a writer to be given the chance to adapt one of the nation’s best-loved books. A gift… and a fearsome challenge. Because everyone has their own ‘favourite bit’ of Jasper Jones that is seared into their memory like they actually lived it. ‘I hope you got the cricket match in!’ ‘Please don’t leave out the superheroes — Batman is best.’ ‘How are you gonna fit the entire town of Corrigan on a stage?!’
My own ‘favourite bits’ shift and expand every single time I dip into the pages of the book Jasper Jones. Pulling apart Craig Silvey’s masterful text has been an incredible joy. Both Craig and I hail from country Western Australia. We carry the sense memory of towns like Corrigan in our bones. The incredible characters that blow in and out, like an afternoon southerly. The pillars and politics of those small-town communities. The melting pot of cultures that call these pastoral-industrial dustbowls home, and gift their stories to wide-eyed, eavesdropping, bookish scribblers like me, Craig… and Charlie Bucktin himself.
We can learn the ways of the world from these small communities, these contained universes. They are a petri dish of the bigger picture. The ails of society are often magnified in small towns, but so are the cures. The shared experience of a community, of listening to each others’ stories with an open mind and empathetic ear, is what these towns can do best and what we can all do better.
I don’t want to go into what Jasper Jones is trying to say as a play. It’s saying everything or nothing, depending on what you choose to hear. But for me, adapting Jasper Jones has been like taking a wander through my own childhood — the good parts and the bad — and realising just how much, and how little, things have changed. How far we have come and how far we still have to go. In the words of Jasper Jones himself: we gotta get brave.
Jasper Jones plays in the Dunstan Playhouse until Saturday 7 September. Tickets are available here.
