I'm sitting in a dark space. It might once have been a warehouse, but now it's a theatre space, large and bare and painted black. Panels of wood that have been used to create all kinds of stage structures and impressions are stacked like huge books. It should be sombre, but I find myself looking around with excitement, as if out of all this silence and darkness a play might suddenly start to create itself. An electric feeling: that things are possible, that things actually might happen ...

I'm in this theatre space in Erskineville to talk with Anna Messariti, artistic director of PACT Theatre, and director of the brilliant and movingly exuberant recent production of Melina Marchetta's Looking for Alibrandi.

While I'm waiting for Anna (she's busy with rehearsal schedules, phone calls, the thousand things of theatre life) I look at photos - Michael Bates' beautiful character studies, snapshots from innumerable workshops and rehearsals. Young people having fun, young people caught in a moment of heartstopping poetry, young people memorably embodying the

£go king for characters of Melina Marchetta's marvellous novel.

Looking for Alibrandi has been a friendly part of my life for nearly two years. Novels that scoop all the best prizes are not necessarily the best novels, but the operatic generosity of emotion and the wholly unpretentious epic quality of A/ibrandi mark it out as an exceptional work in the field in which it has won so many prizes, the field of young adult fiction.

Young adult fiction isn't actually a genre in which I'd want to place Alibrandi -or indeed many other books that are so classified. Young adult fiction-doesn't the name imply fiction written specifically for young adults by those who are no longer young adults? And isn't an intrusive moralising element almost inevitable in such fiction? Scratch the surface and out pops a preacher full of dire warnings or comfortable homilies. Alibrandi is a novel about the experience of young adulthood­about revelatory everyday journeys, choices, discoveries, family relationships, love relationships,

friendships, social fabrics, conflicts, living and dying. It is written from the experience of young adulthood, not for the edification or entertainment of young adults. It doesn't moralise. It honestly presents and explores choices. It's a mature novel with a moving moral presence but without a hint of a moral agenda.

Some time after I first read Looking for Alibrandi I met Melina. She was staying at Varuna Writers' Centre in the Blue Mountains where writers are able to work intensively on projects for three weeks. It was early 1994, a time of hot high winds, harsh blue skies and at any moment the terrible possibility of bush fires. I wasn't surprised to learn from her that such a book had emerged slowly, through many drafts and over many years. Not at any point in its progress could its young author have foreseen the overwhelming success the novel would attain. 'Were there'-1 asked once-'dark nights of the soul? Times you just wanted to give up?' It's not the sort of question that deserves an answer, and Melina didn't exactly give me one. Her look

MELINA MARCHETTA told me of huge burdens, and an impressive tenaciousness.

Later that year I accompanied Melina and Jacqueline Kent (author of Angel Claws, I Love You) for a series of workshops and readings in high schools. 'I think if I'm ever asked to recall what Year 12 was all about, I'll remember it as one big cappuccino experience', says Josie in the novel, and I remember the week with these two wonderful writers as one big cappuccino experience-Bathurst, Penrith, Springwood, Katoomba ... As a contrast to the bushfires, there was an early winter morning-too early to find a cappuccino-in Bathurst, cold, grey and meanly windy. Waiting in the theatre it's thrilling to recall the delightful rapport that invariably developed between the writers and the very different groups of young people we discovered that week.

I remember an excellent comment made by a Year 8 student about Alibrandi: 'It's like soap operas - you start to dream yourself into the characters.' In some schools, the vivid life of the Alibrandi characters gave

rise to streams of personal stories and experiences.

There were some amusing down moments. In Springwood Library some students sat up the front with ominous folders. 'They're doing an assignment,' Melina whispered to me. 'They'll ask me about the themes of Looking for Alibrandi.' Come question time and the hand shot up and there was the question, so bright and innocent: 'What are the themes of Looking for Alibrandi?'Several pens waited for the answer. Melina spoke gamely and patiently for a while about how novels aren't really written to illustrate themes. A novelist deals with a sense of life and all the adventures and conflicts that that sense of life implies. Then, inspired, she said: 'Your reading belongs to you. The themes are what you hear.' The pens wilted in disappointment, but I hope I wasn't the only one to have noted that splendid reply.

It is cause for rejoicing that such a book is on the HSC syllabus. One hopes that many young readers will discover through it that their reading

belongs to them, that 'the themes of Looking for Alibrandi' are not the answers to a sum that can be cribbed from the writer but a sequence of experiences and connections that can interweave with the reader's life. (An aside: discussing the large and productive genre of young adult fiction with diverse groups of young people we found practically no evidence that young people actually read any of it. Stephen King, Virginia Andrews, Jane Austen (in every school there is a shy, intense and intelligent devotee of Jane Austen!)­all had their readers, but we wanted to know what young people thought of Ursula Dubosarsky and Gillian Rubinstein and we were disappointed. Yet these marvellous writers achieve excellent sales and are presumably widely read. The genre of young adult fiction has led to a magnificent flowering of writing and publication. Is this reflected in a flowering of actual reading in the genre among young adults?)

I've lost myself in pleasureable reminiscence and bothersome

Looking for Alibrandi: Maryanne Puntoriero

as Josie (photo Michael Bates)

~3

;,king for Alibrandi: Lria De Marco and erine Giovenali as ,g Katia Alibrandi 'oung Zia Patrizig to Michael Bates)

~4

'Your reading belongs to you. The themes are what you hear/

questions-and Anna is suddenly sitting opposite me.

Anna is dark and dressed darkly. She belongs in this space, I think delightedly. She has been Artistic Director since 1993-a tumultuous and involving job. She wanted to create a youth theatre that was genuinely representative of the needs, passions, enthusiasms and, above all, of the diversity of young people. Looking for Alibrandi was in her thoughts from the time she first read it early in 1994. Such a rich, appealing and real diversity of characters. Travelling round schools and youth groups talking about what PACT could be she realised that Alibrandi in fact offered the full range of people and situations that young people were keen to represent and explore.

Anna is a dream to interview. One vague question from me and she fills 45 minutes of tape. She tells me about

the extraordinary process of working with Melina to deconstruct the novel into some two hundred segments. Melina and Anna worked very closely together, Anna striving for as complete as possible an understanding of how Melina wanted the text represented. No doubt there were moments when one or other of them might have used the expression the themes of Looking for Alibrandi. Themes certainly emerged: the concepts of old money and new money, class and the determinants of class, cultural identity, the significance of everyday journeys.

Each of the two ·hundred segments was a living part of the Alibrandi organism, capable of movement and growth and endless variations of expression. At various times in workshops through 1994 up to seventy young people (aged 13 to 25) took part in exuberant improvisations based on these segments. Anna

remarks that even if no production had emerged from these workshops, the experience of working so creatively with such vital and involving material would have been invaluable.

By November 1994 the process of improvisation resulted in a complete rehearsal draft. Up to now, all had been zest and hard-working exuberance. Now was the time to create the delicate, intricate, pulsing relationships that are the true heartland of Alibrandi. All of the casting decisions were jointly agreed by Anna and Melina.

When I saw the play in January 1995, I could see at once that this was the play of young Sydney. There was nothing piously multicultural about it, no faked attempt to be all-inclusive. It had a finely tuned sense of real cultural democracy. It also expressed-without seeming to be inhibited by-an impressive regard for

~, think if I'm ever asked to recall Year 12 was all about, I'll remember it as one big cappuccino experience/

the integrity of the novel. I was much moved by the sense that these young people were not just performing in a play but that the play belonged to them. I'd been warned, by both Anna and Melina, that at three and a half hours it was wildly overlong. My own feeling was that it revelled in and indeed required every moment of its length. Alibrandi is, after all, epic in scope. If I had to speak of the themes of the novel, I'd talk about the generations of families, and how different choices are possible in different generations. Presentation of a theme involving both past generations and present society can't be cramped-and besides this was a production that was overflowing with life and love, so I was inclined to ask for more rather than less.

I wrote earlier of the novel's operatic generosity of emotion and I'd like to use the phrase again for the play. Indeed as I type the words I find myself with a sudden vision of Alibrandi as an opera. Nonna's music, holding a difficult line between dreams and duty, the lyrical flights and confusions of Josie's music, the sad stillness and ceremony of John Barton's funeral. .. It is a tribute at once to the richness and the honesty of the novel that it is so happily imaginable in such a variety of media. As I write this, Melina is working on a film script of the novel. I have every expectation that whatever its transformations the novel's freshness and appeal will continue to be enhanced rather than diminished.

By the end of our interview I've become very curious about the PACT Theatre. The name refers to Producers, Authors, Composers and Talents, and it was founded in 1964 with the general purpose of doing new and Australian works. It was not

originally a youth theatre but became one organically during the 1970s. PACT presently runs classes for 6-12 year olds resulting in two performances of devised works each year. PACT also runs projects for 12-25 year olds-projects rather than classes, with the focus on developing productions rather than performing set texts. After Alibrandi there has been the Oedipus project, a very physical exploration of the concepts of Greek tragedy. After Oedipus comes Love's Labours Found, which will explore the imagery and artifices of Shakespearian texts. As an exciting spin-off to the Alibrandi workshops, a group of young writers and actors collaborated to produce the lively review The Train Almost Stops At Erskinevil/e. I ask about the sort of budget PACT runs on, and specifically how much it cost to mount Looking for A/ibrandi. Anna's reply humbles and amazes me. There are so many institutions doing extraordinary work on budgets that would seem to cover nothing more than morning tea and the occasional lunch.

It is late evening as I leave Erskineville to travel back to the Blue Mountains. Because I have a head full of Alibrandi it seems natural to stop at Leichhardt, to sit in the street and eat pasta and drink cappuccino, to watch the clouds and the young people drifting by. The grey clouds catch orange from the setting sun, and the young people acquire a radiance from the presences in the novel. Where are they going? Who lives where they live? What balancing acts do they have to perform each day so that their worlds keep going round? Some of them sit down close by. Year 12, I guess. Out for a cappuccino experience.

Peter Bishop