Meet Jamie Hornsby: Playwright
We sit down with the winner of the Senior Category of the 2018 Flinders University Young Playwrights Award
As you busily prepare your entry for the 2019 FLinders University Young Playwrights’ Award get some inspiration from our 2018 winner, Jamie Hornsby.
What inspired your play ASCEND?
ASCEND is a psychological thriller about a woman who infiltrates a cult in an attempt to avenge the loss of her brother. It’s heavily inspired by events surrounding several real world groups, chiefly Scientology, The People’s Temple and NXIVM. I had wanted to write about cults for a while, but I had never found the idea that would propel me through the play. It was with the arrest of the leaders of NXIVM and the surrounding media coverage that I found it. As I started reading more and more about these groups, the play began to emerge.
There’s also a connection to the discourse of the current moment. The play is a systematic destabilisation of the protagonist’s reality, until she can’t be sure of anything at all. In a world of “Fake News”, it becomes increasingly difficult to get a grip on any sense of objective reality. We’re in a “post-truth” world. That’s terrifying to me. And that’s a large part of why I wrote this play.
How did you get into playwriting?
I learned to write at the same time as I learned to act. I’m a recent graduate from the Acting course at Adelaide College of the Arts, and it was through that engagement with dramatic texts — through living inside them, trying to figure out what made them tick — that I developed my own skill as a writer. I think that transference can occur through any theatrical discipline, be it writing, acting, directing, stage management, design or tech. Engagement in the theatre can take many forms, and they all feed into one another.
What advice would you give to other writers who are interested in writing for performance?
It feels a little strange to be giving advice to other writers, so I can only really point to what works for me:
Read. Read. Read. Plays, novels, newspapers, anything. I think you have to fill your head with ideas before you start to put your own down on paper.
Don’t just imitate your favourite writers. But figure out what it is you love about them, and how their plays function. Take what works and make it your own. Get inspired.
And above all, just do it. It’s easy to sit back and call yourself a writer. It’s another thing to actually do the writing itself. Just do it.
What do you think is the magic of theatrical storytelling?
I think theatre is an act of faith, and of connection. A group of strangers come together and sit in a dark room, facing the same direction. They sit, and they listen, and they hope it will be worth their while. And then they share an experience together, and are connected by it.
That experience doesn’t need to change the world. But if it can do something to the audience — whether it’s to captivate, challenge, amuse, terrify, confront, provoke or inspire — that’s when the theatre is working at its best.
