Prominent Sydney theatre director Anthony Skuse. Pic Gez-Xavier Mansfield
In Katie Pollock’s new play PEOPLE INSIDE ME Lauren works at a crematorium. She hates death, but at least the dead can’t let you down.
Winner of the Rodney Seaborn Award, longlisted for the Patrick White Award and Theatre 503’s Internatonal Playwright’s Award, and shortlisted for the Silver Gull, PEOPLE INSIDE ME is an outrageously black comic look at grief and love and the ways we push the darkness away.
Sydney arts journalist and theatre producer Joy Minter chatted with writer Katie Pollock and director Anthony Skuse about the play
Joy to Katie – What inspired you to write a play set in crematorium?
Katie: I love stories set in non-domestic spaces, particularly if they are in some way unsettling or de-stabilising, which is a great place to start a play. I like to save stories I’ve read and found interesting, even if I’m not sure why, and this play came about when I realised I had a number of clippings about people working in crematoriums. Something in the strangeness of it spoke to me, then the characters and story grew from there. There’s something a bit steampunk about the idea of a crematorium – ancient, slightly transgressive, otherworldly, delicate and hidden, but also mechanical and very ordinary. It’s a place most of us will never visit, or only at the most extreme and turbulent moments of our lives, and yet people work there every day. In these in-between spaces, strange and heightened things can happen.
Joy to Anthony – This is your third time collaborating with Katie – what is it about her plays that speak to you?
Anthony : I enjoy the whole process of working with Katie, from sitting round the table listening to her read the play and asking questions to the opening night. Plays always have a secret life that has to be teased out and nurtured. I think Katie is sensitive to that and curious about what actors can reveal about her work. In the plays themselves, I’m struck by this tension between withholding some sort of secret and its disclosure. And in each case, there is a cost. Some characters are unable to articulate it as in Normal and their only recourse is self-harm. Others use anecdotes to get to it as in Rough Trade. In each case these women are negotiating a system that doesn’t have their best interests at heart; the patriarchy, capitalism, the family. So, in answer to your question, I appreciate the bravery it takes for these women to carve out a space for themselves.
Joy to Katie – Can you remember a time in your life when you identified with your character Lauren?
Katie : I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I have been on a number of ridiculously dud dates, as Lauren does in the play in her quest to answer deeper questions about herself and/or get a root. Some of the lines used by our chaps are direct lifts. I challenge all previous dates of mine to come to the show and see if they can spot themselves. There’s a lesson in here somewhere. It’s either don’t date a playwright, or don’t screw a playwright over.
Joy to Anthony – Tell me about a time that a production didn’t go as planned?
Anthony : Every production has its surprises on a prosaic level and an interpretive level; cast and creative changes, schedules that go awry, technology that refuses to work, and then you have those moments in rehearsal when you realise you have everything round the wrong way, that you’ve missed the heart of the moment. Those moments are the best regardless of how late they may arrive. Disruption and adaptation are part of the plan.
Joy to Katie and Anthony – What is your favourite play (of another writer)?
Katie : Oh, this is such a hard question. I honestly don’t think I have one, even though there are so many writers I have huge admiration for. The play I re-read most often is Fleabag by Pheobe Waller-Bridge. I think she ushered in a different way of doing direct address, that we’ve all tried and mostly failed to measure up to, and a beautiful messy depiction of womanhood. But it might also be because it’s short.
Anthony -:The range of plays is too wide and like music, plays resonate differently at different times; if I had to pick a moment, I’d say the final act of A Winter’s Tale when the statue comes to life. For me, it touches on the dissonance between grief and hope. Her silence and his despair are almost unbearable. In the next breath I could say, ‘the last play I worked on.’
Joy to Katie – Did you think about, or were you influenced by the geopolitics of burial vs cremation at all when writing People Inside Me? And are you in favour of one over the other?
Katie : No. I don’t care because I’ll be dead. Although as one character says in the play: “The world is running out of space. Sixty thousand deaths a year in this State alone, the death rate’s going up by two per cent a year and you get maximum two thousand bodies per football field of space. You do the maths.” I mean that… you do the maths, please, I write the words.
Joy to Anthony – Are you in favour of cremation or burial and if so why?
Anthony : The question reminds me that I should look into it as no one knows the day or the hour.
Joy to Katie and Anthony- What is next for you?
Katie -:Anthony and I previously collaborated with producer Joy Minter on my one-woman play Rough Trade. I performed it myself for Sydney Fringe (garnering a couple of award noms along the way) then we toured it to Theatre Works in Melbourne and after it was over I was so relieved and thankful I didn’t have to do it again. But the other day I had an idea for another one-woman show… I can feel myself regretting it already!
Anthony : Europe.
Katie Pollock’s PEOPLE INSIDE ME will play the Flight Path Theatre, Marrickville between the 6th and 15th August with a preview on the 5th August 2026. The cast comprises Kate Bookallil, Peter Eyers, Will Johnston and Charlotte Salusinszky.
Tickets $25 and $45.
hpps://www.flightpaththeatre.org/whats-on/people-inside-me
