Part comedy, part meditation on a changing Australia, Truck Driver is the latest solo-performance from queer icon Jonny Hawkins.
We spoke to Jonny about the show's inspiration, the deep research behind his truckie character 'Bev', and the incredible team of artistic collaborators joining him on the journey.
Where did the inspiration for Bev come from?
When Nell and I set out to tell this story, we were clear we didn’t want a caricature of a truckie. We wanted someone with their own way of seeing the world. That was only ever going to happen with the time and space to do real research. And boy. Did I go deep.
I got my truck driver’s licence, worked in loading docks. I drove up and down the coast, and if I saw a rig parked out the front of someone’s house, I knocked on their door. I joined Owner Driver Facebook groups and listened to talkback radio. In the end I interviewed about 30 truck drivers and their family members.
Bev isn’t a real man, but he isn’t pure invention either. He’s a composite of the men I interviewed and some I’ve known my whole life. Men I don’t always agree with. Men I’d been afraid of. Men whose help I’ve needed. Men whose lives look nothing like mine and yet kept showing me something I recognised. My own working-class roots, for a start. And a frustration I reckon a lot more people share than would say out loud. You can spend your whole life doing the work that holds the country together and still get treated like part of the problem.
Bev is the sort of man I’d normally avoid at a BBQ because of what he might say. I climbed into the cab anyway. I still don’t quite know what to do with how much I ended up caring about him.
Truck Driver has been described as ‘genre-defying’ — tell us more!
I’d push back on “defying”. It’s not trying to escape genre, it just doesn’t fit neatly into one. It’s a solo character study that borrows from a few places at once. An often very funny piece of drama in which nothing much really happens. The audience is picked up as a hitchhiker and driven to Alice Springs. There’s no road-to-Damascus moment. We leave Bev almost as we found him. But you’ll get out at Alice Springs knowing a world most of us only ever see in the rear-view mirror, and by then he’ll have got under your skin more than you ever planned to let him.
How will the show make audiences feel?
I’m not interested in a character the audience is told to love. Bev earns nothing easily, and neither does the audience’s feeling for him. The show asks you to sit with someone you might write off, then makes the compassion you arrive at feel like something you discovered rather than something I handed you.
"Bev is the sort of man I’d normally avoid at a BBQ because of what he might say. I climbed into the cab anyway. I still don’t quite know what to do with how much I ended up caring about him."
Who are you collaborating with, and what do they bring to the work?
Nell Ranney and I have been working together for years. We don’t always agree. That’s the point. She’ll push on a choice until it either justifies itself or breaks, and every draft has been sharper for it. The production wouldn’t be the elegant piece of theatre it is without her. Left to my own devices, the set would have been a cardboard truck with paper trees on a lazy Susan whizzing past a cutout windshield. We both love finding people outside our circles who turn out to be far wiser than we had any right to expect.
Jo Dyer is the producer, a true legend of the industry. This project has faced a few highly unusual setbacks, and she has somehow made sure it happens. There’s a certain hilarity in an independent show, written by a gay person from the Central Coast about a truck driver, having its premiere at the Opera House. I’ll personally never get over it. That’s the magic of Jo Dyer.
Nick Schlieper is our lighting designer, another titan of the industry, who has designed some of the most beautiful productions in Australian theatre over the last few decades. What he can do with light changed the script. Why say anything when the lights can do it so beautifully?
Isabel Hudson is our set designer. She’s solved a famously hard problem: how to keep a road-trip play moving while the stage itself stays still. The centrepiece is a tiny truck found on Facebook Marketplace. In a past life, we’re fairly sure, it was a ride-on lawnmower. An Opera House premiere built on a secondhand mower. I love it. She and Nell have worked together for years, and they’ve got a shorthand that builds whole worlds out of almost nothing.
Steve Toulmin is our sound designer and composer, and getting him to work in theatre again was a coup. His score won’t sit still. One minute it’s a horror film, the next it’s a techno set, then it’s something small and domestic. He’s made an edit of my favourite Bruce Springsteen track into something I could happily play out at a club.
There’s a lot of really special people putting a lot of love into this very peculiar show.
A Soft Tread production presented by Sydney Opera House in association with Performance Space.
