"It's all about me!" Xavier, The Narcissist
Meet Xavier, the sharp-tongued, witty, urbane protagonist from the satirical imagination of playwright Stephen Carleton. He’s self-serving, ambitious, cut-throat and like most of the characters in Stephen’s new play, a narcissist. The parade of characters in the aptly titled The Narcissist, hardly sound like people you’d want to spend an evening with but, as audiences at Brisbane’s La Boite Theatre discovered, indulging in their lives is endlessly entertaining.
“When you are writing comedy, you never know how it is going to be received until it’s performed,” says Stephen Carleton down the phone from Brisbane. “When you are doing a study in ‘social shallowness’ you hope isn’t going to be the quote they use on your own tombstone as the play dies! All the characters are unsympathetic characters to an extent but people connected with them and said: ‘That’s me!’ or ‘That’s someone I know!’”
Stephen, an established playwright on the national theatrical landscape, won the 2005 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award for Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Sommerset, an Australian Gothic Melodrama. When he was offered a commission from La Boite Theatre Company, he jumped at the chance to write a contemporary comedy in a specific genre.
“I had been studying restoration and renaissance comedy and I was interested in this style,” explains Stephen. “There have a whole stack of things in common. There was often a male central character, a bit of a libertine, a rake who was world weary and fatigued by the morals and fashions of the day yet also seduced by them. The plays were often a direct satire of what shallow values the middle classes or the aristocracy of the day were holding dear. That was the inspiration for The Narcissist; to discover what our preoccupations as a culture are today.
“I saw narcissism as the vice that we are guilty of at the moment. Every character in the play, not just the central character, Xavier, is a narcissist and represents a different component of society at the moment -the media, politics, religion, urban gay culture, popular culture, reality television. Every character represents the self interest of these broader social groups.”
“We are so invested in the self that we have forgotten how to connect,” explains Stephen. “Xavier then attempts to turn this into a virtue but is that really what he wants? How much of what these characters say about themselves do they, or we, believe? Are they really as disinterested in intimacy as they say they are or are they actually fearful of intimate engagement?”
Stephen’s next work, after finishing the sequel to The Narcissist, certainly sounds challenging. A “futuristic piece” it follows the development of the ‘culture wars’ debate twenty years into the future. Having written a gothic melodrama, a social satire and now a work of speculative fiction, its clear Stephen has eclectic theatrical tastes. However, as one might expect, he admits a love of language and the written word.
“I am interested in language as revenge at the moment! I feel like language and the word became unfashionable in the late nineties and early naughties and although I like work that challenges form, I’m not sure what the point of it was. I think we ignore the written and spoken word at our peril at the moment. That is why it is important we get back to language. Even as we constantly strive to find new forms – I’m not for a moment advocating we shouldn’t constantly evolve and rattle sabres and cages - I think there is an urgency to embrace language.”
Laura Scrivano
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