Source: Radio New Zealand
British writer Julia Grogan penned her first play, based on the “deeply upsetting” Grace Millane case , on the Notes app on her phone in between bar shifts.
Grogan, then in her 20s, was an out of work actor, feeling lost and confused when she read about the tragic case of backpacker Millane, who was murdered by a man she met on Tinder in Auckland in 2018.
“Her story, I read about it at a time where I was feeling quite lost and confused about what I wanted to do … with my life,” Grogan told RNZ’s Saturday Morning .
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“As with all my work, it’s trying to understand and untangle how I feel about an emotion that I’m experiencing something uncomfortable. Reading about her case just brought back so much repressed feeling about what it is to be a young woman growing up in an environment where there is this rise in violence and sex.”
Millane was strangled by her 27-year-old killer in his Auckland hotel room on 1 December, 2018 – the day before her 22nd birthday.
A recent Justice Committee report for Parliament called out the difference between rough sex and sexual assault, and asked for improved education for young people.
“I think basically it’s a huge call to action to get kids talking about this kind of thing in school,” Grogan said.
“The sex education that I received at my school was so far behind and wasn’t caught up to how much exposure everybody had to pornography on their phone and what I suppose was leaking into mainstream pornography that people were watching as kids.”
Timely then, that Grogan’s Playfight , will run at Auckland’s Silo Hall from 14-30 May. It is directed by Brita McVeigh and stars Mirabai Pease, Liv Parker and Ana Chaya Scotney as three 15-year-old girls.
Playfight director, Brita McVeigh, at rehersals.
David St George
The play, in Grogan’s own words, is about “three kids yearning for a better future … against a backdrop of a rise in violence and mainstream pornography”.
She adds: “But the play is a total love story between three friends and it’s meant to be funny and it just so happens that they are trying to make decisions in a world that’s pretty impossible for them.”
Mirabai Pease and Liv Parker at rehersals for Playfight.
David St George
After the Silo run, the play will visit Tāmaki Makaurau schools, but so far only girl’s schools have signed up to see the performance. Grogan hopes to get it in front of more boys and men.
“I want people to feel less shame around the subject and I think it’s a call to men and boys and girls to feel unafraid of talking about these things and things that come up and we’re allowed to be questioning,” Grogan said.
“I put so much thought into the male characters in that play who never appear on stage but every single boy who was mentioned in that play has a really nuanced backstory and I’ve thought really deeply about what they represent.
“I assume that the decision makers would think, ‘oh it’s about three women so therefore it maybe doesn’t apply to boys’, but I’d say that it’s looking at a really important subject, yes, through these three women but it’s so important for boys to hear that and to be engaging with it.”
British playwright, Julia Grogan.
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Grogan said she uses humour as a tool to talk about dark matter, something that came “alarmingly easy” as uses this tactic in her own life.
“Particularly when writing in the mouths of teenagers, I really reflect on how I had an absolute inability to express how I felt so it always came out in jokes and if I felt sad, I was funnier and I think we’re most vulnerable when we’re laughing … even the shape our face makes … mouths open … you can really sucker punch people with sadness when they’re laughing.”
Ana Chaya Scotney at rehersals for Playfight.
David St George
It’s a bit like being in a boxing match, she says, it’s turbulent and uncomfortable to sit in the Playfight audience.
“That the very case that had inspired me to write it, where all that had happened, and the fact that on that same soil there’s now a story being told, it’s such a beautiful cyclical thing. It’s hard to articulate actually how I feel about it.”
Detective Inspector Scott Beard says mental health support is now a key component of police work.
RNZ
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
