In a crowded WorldPride 2023 cultural calendar, one of the hottest tickets in town is the world premiere of Hubris and Humiliation by Lewis Treston at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf Theatre, previewing from January 20th. A gay rom-com inspired by the work of Jane Austen, the play sees young Elliot being sent from Brisbaine to the bright lights of Sydney by his mother with one goal: find a rich husband to rescue the family after she loses their savings in a catfishing scam. Ahead of opening night, Lewis Treston sat down with The Queer Review’s Sydney correspondent Chad Armstrong to give us an insight into what we can expect from the play and allow us a look behind the scenes at some rehearsal images.
Chad Armstrong, The Queer Review: This is the world premiere of the play, but it’s already award-winner isn’t it?
Lewis Treston: “Yes, it won the Australian Theatre Festival award in New York in 2021. We did a reading there with a bunch of Australian expats. Probably the one with the biggest profile was Jamie Jackson who was about to play another role on Broadway, and he’s in the latest revival of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. The award itself is run by three Australian expats—Connor Delves, Jillian Guerts, and Mark Barfoot—who are all doing an amazing job at bringing new Australian writing to New York audiences, which is pretty exciting.”
The play sounds wonderfully camp, what inspired you to write it?
“I wanted to do something Austen-inspired that wasn’t a strict adaptation. I didn’t just want to serve up a gay version of Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, but to take all the best bits—the hallmarks and the philosophical underpinnings of Austen—to create a queer rom-com set in contemporary Australia. The central conceit is that a young gay man has to marry rich because he needs to save his family from financial ruin. It’s a social satire of gay Sydney and what we consider to be important and valuable within the community. It’s all about tensions between queerness and heteronormativity, wrapped in a big, raucous, funny show!”
I’m not sure what you’re implying about Brisbane, it’s not a small town anymore!
“I still live in South East Queensland and I have a lot of affection for it, but if you live in Brisbane there comes a time when—to pursue love or fame or money—you have to get out of that town. I don’t know if Sydneysiders realize that so much of the rest of the country is coming to them in search of something.”
“When I was 23, I moved down south to study at NIDA and I think I first came to understand what money was when I came to Sydney. Of course there is money around Brisbane and the Gold Coast, but the level of wealth in Sydney and the social protocols that go with that only became evident to me when I got here. That’s really fed into the play I’ve written, which is of course a comedy. It’s about love and romance, but like Austen’s novels it’s also about class. I don’t think you can talk about money and marriage without thinking about class.”
One doesn’t necessarily think about Australia as having a class structure, we have a strong cultural myth of egalitarianism. How would you describe class in Australia?
“Class is to do with home ownership and what suburb you live in and what school you send your kids to and what job you do. In Australia, and this is just my hypothesis, maybe it’s related to the tall poppy thing, the fact that as a culture we like to undersell ourselves. I think it’s become a taboo topic. In its humorous way, the play is trying to bring out what’s hidden. Of course people think about the social and financial standing of the person they may one day marry, but it’s just become inappropriate to discuss it.”
Like most queer scenes, Sydney’s has changed a lot over the last few decades. How does the play reflect that?
“The central character is an outsider, so we encounter it through Elliot’s eyes, and the scene here is larger than he’s used to in Brisbane. Then the play takes on a global leap and we go to Berlin, but I don’t want to give away too much of the plot at this stage. Hubris & Humiliation is trying to reflect the Sydney scene in all its complexity and not pin it down as just one thing. On one level there is that very manicured, polished, body-worshipping aspect of gay Sydney, then there’s an older generation and the more politically progressive Inner West queer community. There’s all the contradiction and conflict and joy and celebration within the community. It’s a very queer play; everyone in the play is queer on some level and there is conflict within that. That’s life, you get ten gay people in a room and you get ten different opinions. It’s not “gay men think this” or “lesbians think that”, it’s never one thing.”
Was Hubris and Humiliation always intended to premiere during WorldPride?
“Well, the concept has actually been with me for a very long time. I first pitched an idea like this to a theatre company back in 2016 and then wrote it as part of a research project for a Masters degree. So initially I had quite humble ambitions for it. I thought a few friends and I would put on a production in a small theatre, but then Sydney Theatre Company came onboard and everybody got really enthusiastic about it. There were some delays courtesy of COVID, but it feels like it’s timed really well now with Sydney hosting WorldPride.”
As you mentioned, this isn’t strictly an adaption, but you have done some adaptation work before, what do you enjoy about that process as a writer?
“It’s fun mixing colloquial Australian into the heightened language of these classics that I’m imitating. It’s a lot of fun playing with genre while also trying to create a world that is very specifically its own thing. I’m not that interested in what’s literal, I’m more interested in the poetic and heightened. I’ve pretty much always worked in comedy, and I actually thought that this play was too silly to get serious attention. There’s always a darker underpinning to comedy though and the stakes need to be high for something to be madcap.”
Do you think that gay men look for different things in marriage than straight folks do?
“Everyone is fundamentally a complex mix of things and your sexual identity is certainly going to inform what you value in a partner. Everyone is motivated by things in their backgrounds and I do think that there are broad differences, but we’re all an individually complex mix.”
Finally, what would you say to entice people to see Hubris & Humiliation?
“It’s sexy, it’s ludicrous, and it will make you think about the choices you make in love.”
By Chad Armstrong
Hubris & Humiliation plays at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf Theatre from January 20th until March 4th, 2023. Click here for more details and to purchase tickets.
