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Victoria Finlay

FOR Australian playwright Katherine Thomson, writing a play is rather like creating a picture. So she always starts with a pile of coloured pens and a great sheet of white butcher's paper, and begins scribbling and creating sweeping diagrams.

  'I use reams of paper - it's very cheap, which means psychologically I can have lots of stupid ideas, and just throw them all away afterwards,' said Ms Thomson, who has written plays for theatre companies throughout Australia.

  Ms Thomson is in Hong Kong as playwright-in-residence at the Fringe, with the plan to spend two months researching a play about the territory, as well as holding a workshop for aspiring playwrights this weekend.

  At the moment her research consists of asking questions of everyone she talks to, and going for long walks, notebook at hand.

  'I usually write about people whose voices aren't usually heard,' she said, although she admitted she had not yet worked out who those people are in Hong Kong.

    'It's hard to know, if you can't speak Cantonese,' she conceded: 'Although I don't think it's impossible.

  'The other day I saw a trolley attached to the middle of a bridge. Obviously someone comes to collect it every morning, and locks it up again at the end of the day.

  'Perhaps I could follow the process, see who uses it, who they meet on the way.'   The play she eventually comes up with - which will be performed by the Sydney Theatre Company - will probably be a montage, moving from one image to the next.

  'I tend to break all the rules [about structure]. At first because I didn't know them, and now because I like the results.'   She usually goes somewhere - small fishing villages in New South Wales, a port town in Western Australia - and writes about what she sees.

   Not everything, just the details that most strike her.

  'I went to Fremantle to research a play. I was there for six weeks and had nothing at all. Everything had either been done before, or was just 'boys' stories' - the US fleet, or trade unions - which didn't interest me.

  'I had almost given up, almost written off the town as boring, and I was feeling rather depressed. I had absolutely nothing.

  'So I went to buy a beer. And I was served by a wonderful statuesque old barmaid - you know the type - big-bosomed, great service and could probably silence a roomful of men with a glance. 'I knew this was my story.'   The result, Barmaids, written initially for the Deck Chair Theatre Company in Fremantle, won the 1992 Australian Writers' Guild award. After the coloured pens on paper process, writing a play takes Ms Thomson a very long time. 'Each one takes about a year - I'm probably a slow writer.

  'Diving for Pearls took about three years, although I was doing other things as well.

  'The structure is the main thing - and I have to wait until the characters start speaking for themselves. Once I catch myself telling them 'you can't say that' I know it's beginning to work.'   The first time Ms Thomson, who had been an actress for 15 years before she turned to writing, ever submitted one of her plays to a theatre group, she felt terrible.

   'I just wanted to die, or run away.'   And even now, years later, with plenty of plays and TV scripts behind her, she still 'feels miserable' whenever someone sees her new work.

   Perhaps because of that sensitivity, she does not subscribe to the confrontational self-criticism method of workshops: she thinks it diminishes confidence.

  'What I want to try and show people is how to get the intellect out of the way, and let the creativity start working.

  'You can't think a good play through - you have to feel it.' 



The play's the thing