Writers on Writing is our regular conversation with a writer or industry professional about the writing craft, industry insights and their own practice. This week, we spoke to Hilary Bell about writing for a physical medium, producing work in collaboration with other artists and where she finds inspiration.
You’ve written for a variety of different mediums including stage, screen and radio. In your experience, what makes an idea particularly suited to the stage, and how does your approach to storytelling differ when writing for theatre instead of other art forms?
What theatre does particularly well is to plumb the depths of an idea. I’m generalising here, there are always exceptions to the rule, but where film relies on events, theatre doesn’t need a lot of story; instead it’s an opportunity to excavate, to keep peeling back layers. Both film and theatre are visual mediums, but where film relies on a physical environment, theatre enlists language to build a world, and to convey images to an audience’s imagination. If you’re wondering which medium a story is better suited to, I’d ask how important of a role ‘place’ plays, and whether it’s driven by plot or by the interrogation of an idea.
Dialogue is central to playwriting, but subtext and absence can be equally powerful. How do you balance dialogue, silence and physical action to reveal character and create dramatic tension?
It’s important to keep in mind when you’re writing a play that it’s first and foremost a physical medium. It comes into its own when realised in three dimensions and with that crucial ingredient: an audience. There are multiple ways to reveal character onstage – not only through what they say and do, what’s said about them by others, how they dress, walk, laugh, dance – but also through what they refrain from saying, or perhaps what they’re unable to say. Silence can be very powerful. In real life, rarely do we say exactly what we mean: the same is true of characters. A pleasure for both actor and audience is experiencing how a character goes about getting what they want without directly asking for it.
What inspires you to write? Do you start with character, a question or something else entirely?
Many different things start me off! The play I’m writing now involves magic tricks. 12 years ago I hit on the idea of using magic metaphorically in an otherwise naturalistic drama, but I couldn’t find the right vehicle. Then last year I read a news article about a case of false identity in a magicians’ club, and I had my story. The impetus for another play was a fleeting image, a mother and teenage boy holding hands to cross the road; for a play to be performed in an art gallery full of precious objects, my starting-point was ‘what if you smashed something?’ With the musical adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the composer Greta Gertler Gold and I began with the idea of ‘stacked time’ – a First Nations temporal concept where past, present and future exist simultaneously – and how we might convey that via music, text and image.
Seeing your writing brought to life on stage must be so exciting! What have you learnt about your own writing through the rigorous rehearsal process, and how have those experiences shaped the way you approach subsequent projects?
Working in the theatre means collaborating. It’s a process involving many artists who will bring their own vision, skills and ideas to the table. You will invariably have to compromise but ideally, the contribution of other people will only make your play better – and I mean not only the production, but the script itself. Actors need logic to be watertight so that they can make sense of their characters; directors may want a transition in order to execute a costume change; inputting both psychological and practical angles will strengthen your writing. I have also become better at trusting the collaborative process. Early on, I was anxious when a director and actors explored a path that differed from what I’d envisaged, but experience has taught me that a) it’s important that they find their own way to the truth, and b) often they will come up with a more interesting solution. What matters is that the intention is clear, and that everyone’s moving towards the same goal.
Hilary Bell is a multi-award-winning playwright and lyricist. Her plays, radio drama, musicals, song cycles and opera have been produced nationally by the major companies, and internationally by Steppenwolf and Atlantic in the US, London’s National Theatre and the Edinburgh Fringe. Her production, Picnic at Hanging Rock: The Musical (composer Greta Gertler Gold), recently premiered Off-Broadway. Wolf Lullaby won the inaugural Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award and remains on the school syllabus.
Hilary was the 2003-04 Tennessee Williams Fellow in Creative Writing at Tennessee’s University of the South, and 2012’s Patrick White Playwriting Fellow at the Sydney Theatre Company. Other awards include the Jill Blewett, Bug’n’Bub, Aurealis Fiction, the Eric Kocher, Inscription, three AWGIES, and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize shortlist. She is a graduate of New York’s Juilliard Playwrights’ Studio, NIDA and AFTRS.
She is a highly regarded mentor, dramaturg and playwriting teacher, having taught for institutions including Writing NSW, Queensland Writers Centre, Writers Victoria, ATYP, New York University, Connecticut’s Wesleyan University and the University of the South, Tennessee, as well as for schools, councils and theatre companies.
The author of several picture books including best-seller Alphabetical Sydney, she is also a member of the playwrights’ collective 7-ON.
Join Hilary Bell for Year of the Play, February – November 2027.
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