Playwright Declan Furber Gillick has written his first play for Melbourne Theatre Company.Credit:Simon Schluter
That journey hits a new milestone in 2021. Gillick’s new playJacky,a hard-hitting,disarmingly funny play about family,culture and love in contemporary Australia,features in this year’s Melbourne Theatre Company season,announced on Tuesday.
MTC artistic director Brett Sheehy doesn’t mince his words. “Having worked with quite a lot of writers over my career I’m completely confident Declan’s going to be one of the great Australian playwrights,” he says. “He’s that good.”
Gillick developedJacky as a resident writer at MTC,and says the company’s Next Stage program gave him “what every writer,worker and artist needs and deserves:a modest living wage”. But above solving the material stress and insecurity that got in the way of his writing practice,it let him “pursue my writing and my ideas authentically and without judgement or an intellectual muzzle”.
“I never thought a play like this would be programmed at MTC. It’s pretty wild.”
Jacky,he says is “an inquiry into integrity and the capacity of people to live with dignity and honour in a world where commerce,the changing nature of media and a country’s contested political history undermine basic human trust”.
The MTC’s Act 2 announcement,of its 2021 program from May onwards,revolves around themes of truth and lies.
There’sThe Lifespan of a Fact,an American play (which starred Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway) about fake news and fact checking,and whether ideology is more important than being rigorously truthful.