That’s the synopsis for my black comedy Seeking Mr Freud. Eastside 89.7FM recorded it last year. It was produced by Gill Falson for her Sonic Tales initiative, directed by Kate Gaul, sound engineered by Stephan Franz, and features Kate Worsley, Jane Phegan, Shingo Usami, Sunny Vbrebac, and Peter McAllum. Seeking Mr Freud is part of the second season of Sonic Tales, along with Pulpit Rock by Gina Schein, and The Night We Lost Jenny by fellow 7-ONer Vanessa Bates.

Tune in to Arts and Drive programs on Friday 27 April to listen to Seeking Mr Freud. To find out more about Sonic Tales click here.

Sonic Tales is supported by the City of Sydney and the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Trust.

I also had a short piece, another black comedy, It’s Your Funeral, in the first season of Sonic Tales. You can listen to it here.

I see thistles everywhere.

I’m just back from 5 weeks in the USA and England. Four of the 5 weeks were spent in the US, mostly in New Haven, and mostly working in Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library, sometimes in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Sterling is a fabulous library, the second largest in North America apparently. More importantly from my point of view, it was a great place to write and research. And late afternoons, when sunlight danced in muted colours on the walls, set the mind loose to dream …

On a side entrance into the library from Wall Street, there’s a door whose brass hinges—I think they’re brass, but they could be some other metal—are fashioned in the shape of thistles. There are a fair few Scottish names attached to buildings and on plaques and signs scattered around the Yale campus so perhaps the thistle hinges stem from one of those connections?

The Hannah First Collection, 1919—1949 is a monologue cum performance essay. It charts the writer’s quest to discover and reconstruct the life and journeys of the early-to-mid 20th century anthropologist and traveller, Hannah First. From her childhood in Amsterdam to her student years at Oxford University. From her initial fieldwork in the villages of Central Europe to the shores of the Dead Sea and the markets of Ceylon (as was) and Singapore. And finally to the idyllic, palm-fringed Tikabar Islands in the Western Pacific, and the book that made her name.

The writer draws not only on photographs, notebook entries and artefacts, but also on her own life experiences—finding considerable symmetry between herself and this intriguing and improbable anthropologist.

There’s more about The Hannah First Collection, 1919—1949’s Shanghai outing here.

See below, or see it on the RANDOM 8 website by clicking here.

The River That Ran Out is a one-act play for children with a cast of 3—either 3 x female performers, or 2 x female and 1 x male. It was Highly Commended in the 2010 Trinity Guildhall International Playwriting Competition (in the category for audiences of 11 years old and under). Find it in: Prize-winning Plays from the International Playwriting Competition 2010, published by Orient Blackswan and Trinity College London.

Meanwhile, here’s the synopsis: Fed up with being neglected and treated like a garbage dump, The River takes off in search of greener pastures.

Once upon a tiger will be published in an anthology due out the beginning of 2012. In the meantime, you can read it here.

‘Benjamin’, probably the last thylacine, at Hobart Zoo circa 1936

It was short-listed for the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award 2011.

RANDOM 8 is original, accomplished film-making for thinking grown-ups. Sure, I’m biased: I was script dramaturg and co-producer on RANDOM 8. But look around you, at the popular uprisings in various Arab countries, at the Occupy protests around the globe, at the artists’ groups and collectives springing up in response to a reduced (and often) conservative cultural climate—RANDOM 8 is a film for now.

Find out why at www.random8thefilm.com

Synopsis
A woman travels through North Korea. Here nothing is as it seems, everyone has their secrets: strangers are polite, but each hides their true feelings. In the late nineteenth century Korea acquired the nickname ‘Hermit Kingdom’ after it closed its doors to the world. These days, while the South is a modern democracy and one of Asia’s tiger economies, in the North the terms ‘Hermit’ and ‘Kingdom’ apply in bizarre and novel ways. What other country kidnaps foreign film-makers?  Regards all overseas tourists as potential spies and saboteurs? And what other nation has installed a dead person as their head of state? Pyongyang Affair mixes fact and fiction to provide a rare insight into this last bastion of hardline communism; the singular and surreal place that is North Korea and now has the dubious distinction of being part of an ‘axis of evil’.

Excerpt 1:

NARRATOR
I’ve expressed an interest in history, so today I’m taken, for another extra charge of course, to The Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum. Ironically, for a system that berates capitalism at every turn, it never passes up the opportunity to make a fast buck.

Someone walks briskly along a corridor. The approaching footsteps stop.



THE GHOSTWRITER
A brown-jacketed cadre turns up to give her some on the spot guidance.

NARRATOR
Like everywhere else it’s a tightly choreographed act. They recite the spiel, chant the statistics, repeat the tales of revolutionary valour. To accord with the prevailing mythology, Kim Jong-il, who was, by most accounts, born in the Siberian town of Khabarovsk, has here been reborn in a log cabin on the slopes of Mount Paekdu. While his parents single-handedly orchestrated the defeat of the Japanese.

The sounds of the museum: echoing passageways and snippets of audio displays.



NARRATOR
The moment of his birth, the curator insists, was heralded by a plethora of meteorological omens and the appearance of a dazzling new comet with a fiery tail. Yeah right, and Bambi was outside frolicking in the snow. I look quizzically at Mr Mok. Does he really believe all this fairytale drivel? Instead I ask: do many people visit this museum?

GUIDE 2
Several thousand every day.

NARRATOR
Yet strangely none of them are here when I take my tour.

Wind.
And the distant sounds of a mass rally or celebration.



NARRATOR
North Korea’s institutions celebrate the past in technicolour and spectacle, while the roadside rhetoric promises a magnificent future. These seem the latitudes where my hosts feel most comfortable. Back then and yet to come. Anywhere but now.

Excerpt 2:

NARRATOR 
(Speaking over the Guide’s list.)
During my last stay in Seoul, I acquired a US government handbook about North Korea, written for Marine Corps Intelligence. At the back is a vocabulary section. So now, in addition to the usual beginner’s phrases:

KOREAN SPEAKER
안녕하세요

NARRATOR
Hello.

KOREAN SPEAKER
처음 뵙겠어요

NARRATOR
How are you?

KOREAN SPEAKER
성함이 어떻게되세요? (What’s your name?)

NARRATOR
I can add such useful commands as:

KOREAN SPEAKER
무기 냬려놔!

NARRATOR
Drop your weapons

KOREAN SPEAKER
자네는 포로이야

NARRATOR
You are a prisoner, and perhaps most helpful of all

KOREAN SPEAKER
라캤 발사기 어디 있어요?

NARRATOR
Where are the rocket launchers?

Music: ‘Song for TKJD’ from the CD ‘Epigraphs.’



THE GHOSTWRITER
Walls have ears. Surveillance is ubiquitous. So she conceals her note-taking and carries her daypack with her even to the bathroom. And if this is starting to sound rather too much like something dreamed up by Ian Fleming or George Orwell, just remember that paranoia is an integral part of the North Korean experience.

GUIDE 2
Your daughter is how old?

NARRATOR
18.

GUIDE 2
You said before she is 16.

NARRATOR
Did I?

GUIDE 2
Yes.

NARRATOR
I made a mistake. My elder daughter is 18; the younger 16.

GUIDE 2
You have 2 daughters?

NARRATOR
Yes.

GUIDE 2
You told me before you have one.

NARRATOR
I’ve forgotten

THE GHOSTWRITER
the 2 fundamental rules of being interrogated: never volunteer extraneous detail, and never tell a lie unless you’re able to stick it out to the bitter end.

© Noëlle Janaczewska

You can listen and/or read the excerpt here.

Not yellow melancholy, but another melancholy thistle (Cirsium heterophyllum)