Original cast reunites for live screenplay reading
sapphires It started as a stage play before becoming one of Australia’s best-loved films, and now it’s somewhere in between, with a one-off live reading of the script on Saturday afternoon with most of the key players in attendance.
Deborah Mailman, Miranda Tapsell and Shari Sebbens, three-quarters of the 1960s singing group at the center of the story, will be among the cast attending a live table reading at the Sofitel (Jessica Mauboy and the film’s Irish star Chris O’Dowd won’t be there, but Hunter Page-Lochard, Kylie Belling, Greg Fryer and Bert La Bonte will be).
Writer Tony Briggs and actor Miranda Tapsell will be joined by other members of The Sapphires cast at a table reading on Saturday. Credit: Joe Armao
Its author, Tony Briggs, says re-examining the material in this way is a way of revealing the mechanics of the script, of what the underpinnings of a production look like, so others can feel empowered to try it themselves.
“It’s about inspiration; it’s about being able to follow what your heart tells you to do as a creator for the next generation,” he says. “I think it’s important for creators to follow the heart.”
Briggs credits his aunt, Hyllus Maris, with providing him with such a spark when he was about 14 years old. Women of the Sun I asked him why and how about the conversation he had with Sonia Borg, which became a huge hit in the 80s, and at one point in that conversation I asked him directly ‘do you think I could do something like that?’ I may have implied or asked. And he said: ‘If you want to do this, you just have to believe in yourself and do it’.”
Even though it took decades to germinate, it was the seed of something.
He went on to become an actor, but it was only when his mother began sharing glimpses of her experiences as a singer entertaining soldiers in Vietnam in 1968 that he felt she might have her own story worth telling. Even then, it took a good bit of luck to uncover it.
Shortly after asking his mother for permission to turn his experiences into a play, he encountered Kate Cherry, then managing director of the Melbourne Theater Company, at a birthday party. He asked him what he was doing. “And I said, ‘I’m thinking of writing something. But I don’t know. I haven’t written anything.'”
A week later, he received a call from Simon Phillips, then the company’s artistic director. “He said, ‘I’d really like to talk to you about the play you wrote.’ And I said, ‘which play?’ I said. ‘It’s about female singers,’ he said. ‘Which female singers?’ And he said, ‘you know, about your mother in Vietnam.’ Ah, yes, that game.”
