They say that laughter is the best medicine, and it seems that Van Badham would be inclined to agree. Theatre, meanwhile, has the power to act as a great empathy machine, and also as a thrilling escape from the drudgery of one’s troubles. Add some hearty laughter to that, and you’ve got the recipe for some brilliant catharsis.
It was the perfect execution of this delicate combo – discovered in a chance encounter with the work of Spanish Baroque playwright Félix Lope de Vega – that turned out to be a magic elixir for what was ailing Badham. The active author, playwright and social commentator has channelled all that into A Fool In Love (Feb 6 - Mar 17), a whip-smart new romantic farce that is kicking off Sydney Theatre Company’s 2024 Season in uproarious fashion. (We’re told that it’s going to make Sydneysiders feel “very seen” – you’ve been warned!)
To give us a peek behind the curtain, Van Badham has interviewed herself for Time Out. Yep, it’s Van on Van.
Van: Van, why did you write this play?
Me: Well, I really needed a laugh. My pandemic lockdown experience was brutal – I’d been undercover in a neo-fascist internet cult to write my book QAnon And On – not a lot of LOLs there – when my beloved mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I travelled back to the family home in Sydney to care for her and was there until she died. I was desperate to get my head back into a happier place, and I remembered when I was down on my luck in London in 2010, a friend gave me a ticket to see David Johnston’s brilliant adaptation of Lope De Vega’s 17th century Spanish comedy Madness in Valencia at Trafalgar Studios. For the two blissful hours of that show, I forgot all my problems and laughed myself into a stupor in a room full of strangers. To reconnect with that wonderful feeling, I hunted out some other Lope De Vega plays and found something so electric and funny in his 1613 comedy La Dama Boba that I pitched doing an adaptation of it to the STC. They commissioned it as A Fool in Love – they could see all the Sydney in it, and I guess they needed a laugh, too.
Van: So what’s the play about?
Me: The original story is about two sisters from a formerly rich family that’s lost its money and is on the verge of losing its home. The younger sister is smart and has expensive taste but no immediately marketable skills, while the elder sister is (ahem) no intellectual, but stands to inherit a vast fortune if she marries. Some ambitious boys from the ‘burbs (and their posh mates) come sniffing around the sisters, resulting in schemes, deceptions, miscommunications and lots of running around. This is all from the original Lope de Vega, but it was being back in Sydney – in my mum’s little house in what used to be the bogan boondocks and is now a gentrified “lifestyle” suburb full of new money and aspirationals – that the old play’s considerations of money and ambition were just in front of me, all the time.
In his review of Madness in Valencia, the great UK critic Michael Billington observed that Lope de Vega consistently explores the idea that “the mask becomes the face”. This particular theme speaks to the eternal Australian comedy that’s our strange local obsession with contests of wealth, class and status. We’re a society where you can be ruling class with no influence or money; absolutely loaded but proudly working class; or educated, middle class and completely unemployable. in Sydney, these distinctions are particularly glaring. “Do we become who we affect to be?” is a very Australian question, running through our best stage comedies (looking at you, David Williamson). It’s a cliché to say the jokes write themselves, but while I was lurking back in the ‘burbs watching kids bang around my old neighbourhood in luxury cars and work out around the foreshore in exercise gear that cost more than I earned in the tax year 2011… Well, the gags were truly dive-bombing the page. So much linen. So much lycra.
Van: This is your second show with the Sydney Theatre Company after Banging Denmark sold out in 2019, but this is your first with director Ken Moraleda. How did that relationship come about?
Me: Ken and mine’s collaboration was a match made by the STC. The playwright/director relationship is everything when it comes to new writing for the stage, and when Ken walked into our first meeting in a melon-coloured tracksuit, I knew immediately he was the director for me. We share the same stage politics of being willing to do literally anything to get the audience laughing, which we’ve ruthlessly indulged in A Fool in Love.. With his encouragement, I think I’ve redrafted every joke at least once, just to wring that extra nanosecond of laughs. He, like me, is a creature of the Sydney ‘burbs, and he just got the characters immediately. His casting is perfect, wonderful, absolutely no notes, and as for the design team, let’s just say, the melon tracksuit was just the beginning. And I did mention: WE WILL DO ANYTHING TO MAKE YOU LAUGH.
Van: When is the show?
Me: A Fool in Love has already begun performances at STC’s magnificent Wharf 1 Theatre. The season proper runs until March 17, with lots of matinees as well as captioned performances, Auslan interpreters and audio-described performances (it’s all listed on the website).
Tickets for A Fool in Love range from $40-$125 and you can snap them up over here.