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Playwright Tom Wright on the purpose of creativity
The Saturday Paper
By Anna Snoekstra
September 13-19, 2025
Playwright and dramaturg Tom Wright – whose adaptation TROY is on at Malthouse Theatre – loves the ephemeral nature of his chosen art form.
“I was swimming alone at Whale Beach and I got caught in a rip and died,” playwright Tom Wright tells me. He didn’t really die on that beach 25 years ago – after all, he is zooming with me from a tiny back room at Malthouse Theatre, where he is in rehearsals with director Ian Michael for the production of TROY.
“In my personal mythology, I died,” he explains. “I somehow managed not to panic and floated my way into safer waters. I got back to the beach and my legs were like jelly and I crawled, literally crawled, back to my towel. I wasn’t pompous enough to think that I’d been returned for a purpose or any of that Hollywood stuff.”
Wright’s near-death experience reinforced his decision to live “an irresponsible life”. He is highly aware that he comes from security and privilege and decided that to live without assets or property was the ultimate privilege.
“I’ve lived as a grasshopper and not enough as an ant,” he says. “That came from a sense of this precariousness of what it is to be alive and what it is to share and make. It made me feel like, oh yes, it’s all right. Everything now is just a bonus.”
TROY is Wright’s seventh retelling of a classical text – others include The Odyssey, The Women of Troy, Oresteia and The Lost Echo – and it’s easy to see how mythic narratives frame his experience of the world.
Wright is artistic associate at Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney but considers himself a “Melburnian in exile”. His family has been in Victoria since the 1840s, and he was brought up in Russell Street in the CBD in the late 1960s. “My father had grown up on an apple orchard in regional Victoria and as the result of an accident, could no longer run the property,” he says. “Something like Dick Whittington, he had to come to the city to make his living. My mother came from an old Melbourne family full of socialists and radical theorists. Their curiosity and their citizenship were instinctive and tribal. You know, I’ve been away from Melbourne for nearly a quarter of a century, but the bluestone runs deeply in my veins.”
Comparing Melbourne with Sydney, Wright quotes late Australian playwright Jack Hibberd, who observed the differences between Australia’s largest cities. “Sydney was founded by the English in the cultural sense; even its penal convict relationship is an English thing,” Wright says. “It’s also more English in the sense that it’s mercantile, obsessed with trade, obsessed with value, obsessed with your role in the marketplace.
“Because of the gold rush and a whole range of different things, Melbourne is a Scots–Irish city. It comes from the Celtic diaspora more than the Anglo diaspora.” Wright believes Melbourne to be a hard nut to crack if you weren’t born here, and says it can be highly unwelcoming to outsiders.
In Sydney, he says, no one cares what school you went to or who your grandfather was. “They just want your value in terms of your ability to make money. And it’s great when you’re exciting and on the way up the mountain, but it’s deeply lonely when you’re on the other side. Whereas Melbourne, your tribe and the group of friends that you make in your vital decades remain your soulmates for the rest of your life. It’s a deeply safe space, at its best. I’m always happy when I come home. The sky feels familiar.”
Wright’s family valued curiosity above creativity. This is a value he still carries with him. He prizes articulacy, believing it to be the most generous trait you can have. While we speak, Wright works hard to decentralise himself from the narrative. He talks at length about director Ian Michael, about the nature of theatre in Australia, about war, privilege and cultural memory. He quotes famous plays, directors and poets many times. But getting him talking about his childhood, or journey as a writer, is difficult.
I can tell that the dodging and weaving is intentional on his part. His interests lie in the work he’s creating and the voices he is attempting to put centre stage through his retellings. I ask him about his growth as a creative – he thinks the word “creative” is overused. He quotes King Lear – “nothing will come of nothing” – and says that he doesn’t create, he reimagines.
He tells me he didn’t set out to be a playwright. He fell into theatre, first acting and then dramaturgy, because his girlfriend was studying it. “It’s the classic manifestation of privilege,” he says. “I cannot emphasise enough the privilege of being a multigenerational, white, English-speaking Australian and the safety that it gives you. Although I was the first person in my family to go to university, I never felt unworthy.”
“People think that the purpose of being creative is to live forever, but you’ll end up just a forgotten statue battered by the desert winds.”
Although his family was uninterested in his burgeoning career on the stage, Wright’s deep sense of security never faltered. His career unfolded naturally, beginning with one-man shows monologuing death row cases and evolving with a long-term collaborative relationship with Barrie Kosky that culminated in an eight-hour production of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He is now one of the country’s most acclaimed playwrights: his work tours the globe and has earnt him multiple Helpmann and Green Room awards as well as the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting.
“When I was a young man, I callously thought that I was ‘lucky’, to use that great Australian word,” he says. “Now I realise I wasn’t lucky, I was privileged. But it took me a long time to see that. Sometimes I wonder about over-articulate white men in our society and their endless obsession with how smart they are. It feels to me like pages of the newspaper and the internet, or any social forum, are just full of men who have been conditioned by thousands of years to be listened to, still insisting on their right to be right. I’d like my right to be wrong.”
Listening is one thing, hearing is another, he says. “I feel like I’m getting better at hearing when I do listen.”
This connects to a broader shift in contemporary Australian theatre. “At the moment, it strikes me that we’re going through a phase where the director fulfils a facilitator role more than a visionary role,” he says. Wright sees a shift away from the idea of the auteurist visionary director, largely because of mistrust around the ego and power imbalances that often come with it.
In its place, a collaborative model of theatre is thriving, allowing rooms to be safer, more communicative and diverse. Wright is all for this model, finding the shift “exciting”. However, he is also aware that something can be lost, because there are fewer opportunities for people who genuinely want to go out on a limb. “So we’re making better, general quality work, but I would suggest that we’re possibly making fewer productions that are genuinely extraordinary,” he says. “Sometimes you pay for your cultural safety with cultural timidity. And at the moment, I feel like we’re going through a consolidation of what it is to be a nation, what it is to write plays, what it is to make theatre.”
In Wright’s view, Ian Michael, the director of TROY, possesses that genuinely extraordinary visionary quality. Michael originally worked in the box office at Malthouse, selling tickets to previous plays of Wright’s. After a swift career rise, he directed a revival of Wright’s adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock at Sydney Theatre Company, and Wright is thrilled to be working with him again.
“As a Noongar man and as an emerging leader in the Noongar and Indigenous communities across the country, Ian’s work cannot escape the prism of a postcolonial discourse,” Wright says. “TROY is a piece about Ukraine and it’s a piece about Gaza, but it never mentions them. It’s about war. It’s thinking philosophically about what war is and how war works for us, inside our stories and inside our mythologies.”
Wright believes there is great power in the act of retelling myths. He sees it as a way for Australians to learn about themselves as a nation: their strengths, weaknesses and prejudices. But he says that as an immature postcolonial society, Australia struggles with its retellings.
“We either get cultural cringe and try to be like the northern hemisphere model of what it is to make art and literature, and we imitate that,” he says. “It feels like we’re still trapped in that cycle and will be until our reconciliation project moves further on. Or we get adolescent in our insistence on our own novelty. And neither of these options feel particularly satisfactory to me. So, I like the mythic and I like the historical and I like the act of retelling, as opposed to telling.”
Wright respects the art of theatre as an act of resistance against capitalism. He loves its ephemeral nature. “It strikes me that we live in an age where everything is commodified. Our lives and our memories and our intellectual property and the data of our phones is now something that’s passed around in a marketplace,” he says. “But there are occasionally some moments where genuine community can still take place, where a group of people in the city can sit in a darkened room and hear again a story from thousands of years ago, and no one can really commodify that moment.
“The fact that it’s very hard to make money out of theatre is its curse and its blessing. It resists being continually colonised by neo-capitalism. Yes, obviously there are people making money out of commercial theatre, but I’m talking about these kinds of moments. And again, this is the Melburnian in me coming out, is that I value the way in which, in this day and age, frankly, going to a show on a Wednesday night in St Kilda and in the rain is active resistance. You pay your money, but the money barely covers the cost of what it is. No one’s going to come along and say, I love this, I’m going to purchase it. I’m going to package it up and sell 46,000 editions a day. Theatre is very hard to make a mass art form, and that’s one of its great things.”
Wright often thinks about “Ozymandias”, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem in which a traveller describes a ruined statue in a huge, empty desert. The traveller can see in the half-buried form that the sculptor had skill, and notices on the pedestal the inscription: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! “People think that the purpose of being creative is to live forever,” Wright says, “but you’ll end up just a forgotten statue battered by the desert winds.”
He tells me about speaking to students at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) about his work. He mentions his and Kosky’s The Lost Echo, of which he is still immensely proud, as well as other work from the period that he considers deep failures. “One thing these shows have in common now is that not only have the students never seen them, but they also weren’t even born then,” he says. “Theatre is just ice blocks on a frying pan.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 13, 2025 as “Wright to be wrong”.
