When blind dates don’t work out, anything can happen. Just ask Van Badham, arguably Australia’s most provocative playwright and commentator, whose new show, The Questions, is one of the flagship productions of State Theatre Company South Australia’s Winter season. It was partly through Badham’s own dating adventures, after all, that led to her writing the play. It was also how she met Richard Wise, clinical psychologist by day, punk folk musician, lyricist and composer of the live score for The Questions by night.
'Richard and I met on Tinder,’ says Badham. ‘We were dating, but it just wasn’t working, and I couldn’t work out why, because we're so into one another, had so much in common. and liked all the same stuff. We had a lot of friends in common, and I was obsessed with Richard’s band, and Richard was into my writing, so we had this really profound connection, but as a relationship, it just didn't work.
‘Then I had this moment of clarity where I realised we were musical theatre collaborators. No two people can be this obsessed with Joanna Newsom and have these long conversations about modern folk music without that actually being an artistic relationship. It made me realise Tinder is a great place for meeting artistic collaborators, because you're essentially meeting a different version of yourself.’
With Badham and Wise now both happily married to other people, The Questions is a two handed musical rom-com that sees a woman with a master’s degree in Gender Studies hook up with a man who thinks Jordan Peterson would be an ideal dinner party guest. While the couple look set to go their very separate ways, outside forces have other ideas, as a global catastrophe forces them to quarantine together for what might just be the longest blind date ever.
To ease the prospect of domestic warfare, the pair decides to undertake an experiment, in which they ask each other the thirty-six questions devised by psychology professor Arthur Aron proven to generate intimacy between two people.
‘Richard and I did a show in Adelaide called Late Night Story,’ Badham says of the roots of The Questions. “and I was telling him about the experiment with these thirty-six questions that I'd heard about. We thought it was a brilliant idea for a really small scale musical about these two people building this relationship with one another, and experiencing all that pain, joy, bliss and trauma with another person. The way to talk about those really profound sort of suppressed emotions is through songs. In musicals, the musical number is all about the character expressing emotion for which words are not enough.”
The key to the story came when Badham appeared on Channel 9’s Today show during the Covid 19 induced lockdown.
‘I couldn’t quite work out what the hook to the play was,’ Badham remembers, ‘but one of the stories we were talking about was this couple in China who went on a blind date, and who got locked in the building they were in by the Chinese government. Even though they knew the date was a disaster, they were trapped there and couldn't leave. All of a sudden they'd gone from being on this disastrous date, to essentially cohabiting in a non-sexual version of a marriage, like, within minutes. It’s about finding your environment completely destabilised, and then whoever you're with becomes your environment.’
Badham stresses that The Questions “is not a lockdown show. It's a show about two people in an extraordinary circumstance where, through no choice of their own, they become everything to one another, and have to find a way to negotiate that process.”
With State Theatre artistic director Mitchell Butel helming the production, the cast of The Questions features former TV regular on Doctor Doctor, Charles Wu, whose musical outlet sees him perform as Earthquake Magnificent. In The Questions, he will appear opposite rising star Chaya Ocampo, who in 2023 appeared at Sydney’s Riverside centre in the National Theatre of Parramatta and New Ghost Theatre’s premiere of writer Katy Warner and composer Zoe Rinkel’s musical, Girl Band.
‘Charles is a dream, and Chaya is a force of nature,’ Badham says. ‘She did an audition with Charles, and it was just right, and he felt it too.’
While Badham stresses that in a show featuring songs about underpants, the world’s broader political situation hasn’t fed into The Questions, as a political commentator who has been caught in the crossfire of online extremism, and whose study of American right wing conspiracy group, QAnon was published in 2021, she is nevertheless aware of a need to build bridges beyond such polarisation.
In terms of conspiracy theorists, ‘What you can do is keep contact alive and maintain a connection with somebody so that when whatever the conspiracy theories used by them have passed, they have a path back to you through shared experiences and shared values. In The Questions, with these two people facing a pandemic together, that is so important. The story of the play is, if those two stay where they are when the antagonism rises in the first act, that's how they will die, with nothing but resentment. I think human beings can do better than that.’
With this in mind, could the play’s oddest of couples find some kind of happy ending?
‘Well,’ says Badham, ‘it's musical theatre. We're a bunch of musical theatre nerds, who are here to deliver the musical theatre experience, and I think if you love musicals, you'll not be disappointed.’
The Questions, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, 26 July-17 August
The List Adelaide Winter Festivals 2024 Guide, June 2024
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