A tragi-comic story of sisterhood and loss

By GREG DIXON

So that's what an award-winning playwright looks like these days.

Climbing off her small, Japanese motorcycle outside the shabby entrance to SiLo Theatre, Kathryn van Beek is wearing battered, ankle-high motorcycle boots, a long, long, astonishingly floral frock and a smile.

Add the candy-red highlights in her hair and she looks more rocker than writer.

She is a musician, it turns out. But this 22-year-old, who completed her MA in scriptwriting at Victoria University just last year, has also garnered a fistful of awards for her handful of plays.

She won the Playmarket Young Playwrights Award in 2001 and last year, scooped the Best Theatre gongs at the Wellington Fringe festival for both those years and received a Mercury Theatre Trust scholarship in 2001.

The Christchurch-born writer, who also works part-time in a camera shop, has completed around half a dozen plays in the past couple of years. French Toast played to capacity audiences at the SiLo in November. Her latest, For Georgie, is at the SiLo after a run at the New Zealand Fringe Festival at Bats Theatre in Wellington.

All of which is damned fast, successful work by any measure. Van Beek calls it "quite nutty". Er, sorry?

"I guess I have won lots of awards, but from my point of view I'm constantly applying for things and constantly being rejected. Then occasionally someone will give me an award or a grant. But my experience is rejection - it's like that for every artist. But I have been lucky."

The product of the 3girls6legs production company established by van Beek, director Natalie Hitchcock and actress Pia Midgley last year, For Georgie is the story of two sisters, one alive, one dead.

Tessa, played by van Beek, was a singer whose obsession with water has led to her death by suicide. Georgie, played by Midgley, is a DJ trying to work out why her sister did it. Georgie becomes more and more like her sister as her search continues.

"She grows to understand her sister's dark side," van Beek says.

It's already been described by one critic as authentic and tragic, but it's also tragi-comic. At one point, Georgie wonders aloud: "How can a vegetarian kill themselves?"

Van Beek says she can't help putting humour into her scripts. "It just comes out. I think you do need humour to make the seriousness more potent, well, hopefully."

And while it might sound it, For Georgie is not a two-hander, but "one and an eighth". Tessa is heard and seen only through silhouette, a videotaped suicide note and her songs, written by van Beek.

The play is no Chicago, however, even though van Beek, who is also singer-songwriter and bassist for the band Peachy Keen, likes to include music in theatre work. "It isn't like a musical, where songs explain narrative. They're more to add to the mood."

She has researched the subject - as tricky as it is bleak - for some two years, she says, after she was commissioned by the Auckland Theatre Company's 2nd Unit to write The Language of Angels, a based-on-fact play which debuts in September.

It, too, is about suicide. "It's very important not to glamorise it, and I don't think we have glamorised it. But, in a way, For Georgie is more about sisterhood than suicide. It's about the bond between these sisters and the little sister who feels so lost now her big sister has gone from her life.

"It's about loss. One woman who saw the show in Wellington told me afterwards that it was a beautiful wash of grief. I was really pleased with that description."

Theatre, as a form, seems an unlikely choice for a young writer (let alone young audiences) - film will always be a whole lot sexier. Certainly the majority of her MA scriptwriting class thought so. But van Beek, who loves affecting, intelligent theatre, says she's just sort of fallen into it.

"Theatre's just a beautiful medium. It's so beautiful and fresh and you can be really experimental. You can smell the actors, feel how everyone around you is reacting.

"I think people do react to theatre more strongly than watching film because of that element of the unexpected. It's more restrictive than film perhaps, but those restrictions make you more imaginative."

Performance

* What: For Georgie, by Kathryn van Beek

* Where: SiLo Theatre

* When: nightly at 8, until April 5