Patricia Cornelius’ Savages is a confrontational and award-winning play that examines the menacing underbelly of Australian masculinity and mateship.
This season will be a follow-up production for director Kitan Petkovski after his reimagining of Patricia Cornelius’ play In the Club at Theatre Works in 2023. Coming as no surprise, Petkovski is a huge admirer of Cornelius’ work.
“One of my earliest theatre experiences after moving from Aotearoa to Naarm was seeing her double bill of Love and Shit at fortyfivedownstairs, directed by Susie Dee,” says Petkovski. “I remember leaving exhilarated by the muscularity of the language, the pulse of the writing and its uncompromising honesty. There was no sentimentality, no excess—just theatre that trusted its audience. I was hooked, and from that moment I hoped I’d one day direct one of Patricia’s plays.
Savages is now my third collaboration with Patricia, and in many ways, it feels like her boldest work. What surprised me on first reading was how immediately likeable these four men are. Their humour, banter and camaraderie feel deeply familiar, and that’s precisely what makes the play so unsettling. From the opening pages I felt an undercurrent of menace, as though something terrible could happen at any moment. That tension has never left me. The longer I’ve lived with the play, the more interested I’ve become in understanding (not excusing) the forces that shape these men and the behaviours they inherit, perform and perpetuate.”
Inspired by a real-life event, the play is a fictionalized response to the tragic 2002 death of Dianne Brimble on the cruise ship Pacific Sky.
“One of the remarkable things about Savages is that it refuses to reduce its characters to symbols,” says Petkovski. “It’s a play about masculinity, certainly, but it’s also about friendship, loneliness, fatherhood, longing and the quiet grief of feeling trapped by the life you’ve inherited. It asks what happens when you’ve outgrown your friendships but don’t know who you are without them, and how our ideas of love can become tangled with entitlement, fear and unmet expectations.
Alongside those deeply human questions are the urgent realities of misogyny, gendered violence and the pack mentality that can emerge from fear of exclusion or vulnerability. Rather than offering easy answers, Patricia asks where these behaviours begin. She invites us to look beyond individual acts and examine the social and emotional conditions that allow them to exist.”
Deeply unsettling is that the language used in Savages towards women has not shifted greatly in the past 13 years, and neither has male behaviour, leading to an alarming rise in ultra-masculine networks and philosophies such as the ‘manosphere’.
“The heartbreaking reality is that the conversations surrounding violence against women remain just as urgent today as they were when Savages premiered in 2013, “says Petkovski. “Earlier this year, Australia saw four women killed in four days. Those statistics are devastating, but they also risk becoming abstract unless we continue asking how we’ve arrived here.”
Petkovski’s hope is that the play creates space for honest conversations, particularly among young men.
“I hope they recognise fragments of themselves, their mates, their fathers or the expectations they’ve inherited, and begin questioning them. Theatre can’t solve systemic violence, but it can create empathy, provoke reflection and encourage conversations that are often avoided. If Savages helps even a handful of people examine those patterns with greater honesty and compassion, then it has done something meaningful.”
Cornelius is known and lauded for her socially conscious, unflinching theatrical works and Petkovski concurs saying that Cornelius writes with extraordinary precision.
“Her language is direct, muscular and utterly unsentimental, layered with an abundance of emotional and psychological complexity. She has a masterful ability to say so much with so little. Every word carries weight, and every silence feels equally intentional.
As a director, that’s incredibly exciting because her writing also invites theatrical imagination. She trusts the stage. Whether it’s the fluidity of the chorus, the musicality of the dialogue or the permission to embrace bold physical storytelling, her plays ask artists to be fearless. There’s always a sense that something much larger is bubbling beneath the surface, waiting to erupt, and that’s a thrilling place to make theatre.”
Originally a four-hander featuring only male characters, this latest season reimagines the work with an all-female and non-binary identifying cast
Explaining how this changes the dynamics of things, Petkovski says, “There’s a quote from Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride that our lighting designer Harrie Hogan brought into rehearsals which became a touchstone for our process. She writes, ‘You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.’
That idea, that many of us have internalised the male gaze, opened a fascinating way into the play.”
Petkovski goes on to explain that this production explores masculinity through the perspectives of women and non-binary performers who have spent their lives observing, navigating and negotiating male behaviour. “The audience is constantly aware of both the performance of masculinity and the people performing it. It’s another lens through which to investigate the play’s central question: how are these men made? Our approach comes from curiosity rather than judgement. We want to understand these characters in all their contradictions, because that’s where the play’s humanity lives.”
While still somewhat of a rare beast, comparatively speaking, Australian plays on our Australian stages are becoming more frequent. For Petkovski, this is essential both for our identity and community.
“Australian stories deserve to be seen not because they’re Australian, but because they speak directly to the communities we’re living in right now. They reflect our language, our politics, our humour and our contradictions in ways imported work simply can’t. It’s also paramount for Australian plays to not only be shown on our stages, but to be commissioned, developed and produced with appropriate resources. I see incredible new work made here in Naarm and sometimes I cannot help but wonder how much more these artists could have done if they were properly supported. I do believe we make miracles happen on the smell of an oily rag.
I’d love to see more Australian LGBTQI+ stories feature on our larger stages, beyond the indie and fringe festival circuits.”
Petkovski is a multi-award-winning theatre director and dramaturg holding an MFA in directing from the Victorian College of the Arts as well as being a Director’s Lab Melbourne alumni.
As a creative he is drawn to contemporary stories with emotional complexity and characters who resist easy judgement. “I love theatre that asks us to sit with contradiction rather than rushing towards certainty,” he says. “Often the people who fascinate me most are those whose experiences feel furthest from my own, because making theatre becomes an act of listening and learning.
Questions of restorative justice, accountability and empathy often find their way into my work. I think theatre has a unique ability to hold opposing truths at once, to reveal both the beauty and brutality of being human. Those are the stories I keep returning to because they challenge me as an artist and, hopefully, invite audiences to see themselves and others with greater compassion.”
Unflinching, physical, and politically fierce, Savages is quintessential theatre by an Australian playwright legend.
Says Petkovski, “If you’ve never been on a cruise ship (like me) this is probably the cheapest way to find out what it’s feels like.
But more importantly, Savages is funny, exhilarating and deeply unsettling in equal measure. It asks difficult questions without pretending to have easy answers, and it will leave you talking long after you’ve left the theatre.
That’s all I ever hope a night at the theatre can do.”
September 2 – 12
