The stage is set for a terrific year of thespian delights at the Inner West’s favourite performance space, the New Theatre.
Its opening production, The Flea, has just concluded a very successful run as part of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival. Coming up next and making its world premiere, is the fiercely honest, refreshingly funny, Fighting; a play that looks at bipolar disorder from the inside.
Writer and director, Xavier Coy, describes Fighting as a day in the life of someone with bipolar. “With him are two characters who represent the depressive thoughts and the hypomanic thoughts,” Coy explains. “The play ebbs and flows between the states whilst also following a man’s normal day before a crescendo of emotional peril.” Coy himself is bipolar and has referenced his own experiences in writing the play, though he points out it is not an autobiography. “A lot of it is based on my life, in the sense that the psychological battle is very real. Certain stories are real and then there’s story details that are real too. The protagonist works at Vodafone, which I did for two weeks when I was 19 before I got sacked for telling people to go to Optus ‘cause they had better service. From that leaping off point is an imagined world. The events that occur on the day are fiction based in the reality of my mind. It’s pretty raw.”
While the premise makes it sound a little dour, the play is actually a black comedy filled with weird, colourful characters. It has a cast of three but more than twenty characters. The main character is a very lonely man who works in a shop run by an elderly couple who clearly still enjoy an active sex life.
When he meets his ex-girlfriend and discovers she is engaged, it triggers anxiety and leads to a set of real and imagined disasters. Spiralling into an abyss, he receives a phone call which seems to turn things around.
Coy has written many plays, TV scripts, comedic content and other works, frequently also directing, producing and acting in them. He finds he is able to be objective with his own material because, by the time it comes to producing it he is genuinely unfamiliar with it.
“By the time rehearsals come around I am able to disassociate with my role as the writer and look at it as if someone else has written it,” Coy explains. “I’m also blessed with a truly terrible memory so often have only faint memories of writing things. […] I have my subconscious to thank for writing a lot of my scripts. I don’t see things needing to be done the way I wrote it. It always come back to what’s the best way to tell the story.”
In terms of production, the play is minimalist: one prop and three chairs. The lighting design has the most impact on creating a sense of time and space, establishing locations and underscoring emotional states. But the script and the cast will do most of the heavy lifting.
“It’s a real character piece and I want to utilise every centimetre of the big New Theatre stage and have the actors tell the story.”
Coy wrote Fighting shortly after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a way of helping him understand the condition. He hopes it can also help others who are dealing with it, though he emphasises that everyone’s experience is different and this is very much his own interpretation. “I’ve always been interested, often confused, about the psychological processes in the brain, and that was the thing I wanted to explore in Fighting. It was simultaneously confronting and cathartic.
I had to be brutally honest when writing this because I desperately wanted to put a play out in the world that could do that exact thing. In an ideal world someone who is struggling can see this play and connect in a way that could provide some answers and hope.”
Playing now April 12 at New Theatre, 542 King St, Newtown
See the full 2025 New Theatre Season online - newtheatre.org.au
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