Remembering the Bright World
An interview with Neil Armfield
In an interview with Signature, writer Sarah Sentilles said, “If we think God killed God’s son to save us, then that will influence how we understand violence. If we think God is all seeing, then that will shape how we understand other all-seeing devices, like drones.”
Stephen Sewell’s Welcome the Bright World is a political thriller where two individuals, and those they love, come up against the power of the state. Like Sentille’s work, it looks at the effect of violence. How we talk about it, remember it, construct it and live with it, make it commonplace. How violence and the memory of it can leave us alienated and paranoid to the point of radicalism. As we seemingly edge ever closer to a state of emergency, the play’s teeth feel sharper.
The play has only had one professional production in Australia. It was directed by Neil Armfield in 1981 for Nimrod Theatre Company. We sat down with him to talk about the play and its enduring relevance in 2018 before House of Sand bring it to the stage.
Tell us about Welcome the Bright World and your history with it?
Stephen was wanting to write about subjects away from Australia.
Stephen wrote this play about contemporary Germany … it’s about a Jewish nuclear physicist living in Berlin and Bonn to Weisbarden in Germany. It was a very strange kind of area for a play from Australia to be dealing with … and indeed when we opened there was kind of a backlash. I believe Alex Buzo said that he wasn’t interested in the angst of the German hamburger, which was seen as a swipe against this trend of a sort of new Australian internationalism that was happening in Australian writing.
We opened the play in 1981, Stephen had worked and worked the play. He does write very quickly, but it was one of those works where … you know, Stephen has said that a play is finished when a director takes it away from him and says that you can’t write anymore. And, indeed, he was writing up until opening night.
It was a wild and intense play that was really about how the memory of Nazism and the tendency towards fascism is still alive, is lying dormant underneath Western capitalism. And I think the rise of Trump and the rise of the extreme right across Europe, no doubt emboldened by Trump, has shown that Western democracy is in a really delicate state. It could, and can, fall into chaos or collapse so easily. I really think that’s what Stephen’s play is tapping into … the tendency of power towards totalitarianism and how that sits under the characters in Welcome the Bright World.
Both in its 1981 and 2018 iterations, Welcome the Bright World has been presented by independent, artist run theatre companies and early-career artists. What’s the importance of us preserving spaces like that in the current industry?
Having a second or smaller company meant that there was a place for writers who were more on the fringes, or who were writing more challenging to be seriously taken up and explored. It just meant that there were more opportunities around, people rise to fill that space.
I think it helps whole cultural mix that there is great work being done in multiple spaces, where actors and writers are able to develop their art and technique in a way that means that the standards keep on rising and the writing keeps on getting better and that audiences are given a greater choice of great work to see and experience and enjoy.
Works like Welcome the Bright World couldn’t exist without a culture like that.
And I think the rise of Trump and the rise of the extreme right across Europe, no doubt emboldened by Trump, has shown that Western democracy is in a really delicate state.
So much Australian drama and writing- on our screens and stages- is concerned with Australia itself, Australian people. How does Welcome the Bright World fit within that?
Well I think it needs to be set in context, don’t forget that in the 70’s what can be seen a parochial was a very necessary wave of work that looked at our own voice as Australians. Up until the 60’s there’d been a domination in Australian theatre that was the inheritance of British theatre. There were of course Australian voices fighting to be heard, but there was a real discovery in the late 60’s and 70’s of the beauty, the humour of Australian vernacular … it was really a great liberation.
Writers like Stephen Sewell really connected the Australian backyard to places beyond, and I guess it makes you realise if you didn’t already know, that were all part of the same world. And Sewell continued to write about Australia with echoes of international traditions and drama and poetry.
As much as Welcome the Bright World is a play set in Germany, about fascism and about issues that seem far away, it’s also about us. It’s an Australian play.
Welcome the Bright World is State Theatre Company South Australia’s 2018 Umbrella Production. It runs in the Queens Theatre from 20 September — 6 October. Tickets available here.
