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| Jessica Tovey, Eryn Jean Norvill and Kristy Best star in Truck Stop. |
It’s the kind of sex-and-schoolies
scandal Today Tonight would jump on
in a heartbeat: Teenaged girls nicking off from class to turn tricks in a nearby
truck stop. Can’t be true, surely? We’re talking urban myth here, right?
“I first heard the
story from a teacher and then I heard other stories just like it,” says
playwright Lachlan Philpott, whose new play Truck
Stop turns the headlights on the sexualised worldview of Sydney’s
adolescents.
“The story I’ve
based Truck Stop on was a real
incident,” explains Philpott. “A group of Year 9 girls who had got a bit bored
at school decided to go to the adjacent truck stop in their breaks and have a
bit of fun, so to speak. What started as a dare escalated into prostitution.”
When the school
found out, a cover up was initiated. “You would expect that because you have to
protect adolescents from that kind of exposure and protect the school,” says
Philpott. “But around the same time there were girls in the Northern Territory
doing the same thing and the media reported that. So we had one group of girls who
were protected and not the other.”
Commissioned by Penrith’s Q Theatre Company, and working in
collaboration with director Katrina Douglas and dramaturge Francesca Smith,
Philpott researched, developed and wrote Truck
Stop over a 10-month period, weaving material gained from interviews with
school students, truckies and social workers into the script.
He says the play isn’t an account of a
particular incident. “It’s more about contextualising this behaviour in these very
post-feminist times,” he says.
“We have raunch
culture. We have pole dancing and cardio strip as the latest exercise crazes. You
look online and you see all sorts of distorted images of girls and women in
porn. It’s a really interesting time to be writing a play that examines sexual
mores and teenage sexual health.”
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| playwright Lachlan Philpott |
Input from western
Sydney students has been crucial to the development of the play says director
Katrina Douglas.
“We set up
workshops with local high schools and discussed the play. They gave us their
perspective on what they felt about the story and what it’s like to grow up in
this area of Sydney,” says Douglas.
“They were a
little bit shocked by the story but they were also really honest about the
kinds of things they had seen and experienced. The play is really about the
whole world that these young people live in: the media they consume, the
messages they get from family and friends. The act of prostitution itself is
actually quite a small part of the play.”
Actor Jessica
Tovey, who plays one of the schoolgirls, Kelly, says Philpott has a unique
skill when it comes to voicing young adults on stage.
“His characters
have real dignity and he treats them with absolute respect, despite their
actions,” says Tovey. “He never judges them. I think this play gives some
respect back to these girls after all the blame they received when these
incidents happened.”
Sex is a big thing
in high school, says Philpott, a former teacher, and he believes its expression
is being very much influenced by popular culture.
“Girls go to parties
and are kissing other girls just to turn guys on because that’s what they’ve
seen Katy Perry do. Or they dress like Rhianna because they think that’s the
way they’re going to get guys. I find all these images coming through to young
women fascinating - possibly alarming - but I wanted to be careful and not take
a moral stance with it.”
Douglas says the
production has a strong audio-visual component to give audiences a sense of the
complex media world in which young people are immersed. She believes some young
audiences (and their parents) might be shocked by what they see and hear. “But
I think people will understand why these characters have made these choices.”
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