By Jane Albert
The Australian
3 April 2003
Jane Albert meets an actor and playwright who keeps tabs on life's darker side.
Brendan Cowell is sitting in a café deep in concentration as he carefully attempts to pour himself a glass of water. Nothing unusual in that - except that his glass is already full. At the last moment, I point this out.
"Can you not mention that in your story?" Cowell asks sheepishly. "Or maybe you should".
Cowell is within his rights to be a little off the boil. He has just finished performing in the Sydney Theatre Company's sold-out extended season of American Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things. Cowell, who is better known as a playwright, was hailed for his performance.
The talking point of the play was its gut wrenching ending, when Cowell's character realises he has been deceived by his lover and is left sobbing uncontrollably. Night after night, Cowell found grown men with tears in their eyes nodding at him in the foyer, while others came up and hugged him.
Interestingly, it was not part of LaBute's script but an idea Cowell had during rehearsal when director Jeremy Sims played a song by the production's composer, Aya Larkin, and asked the cast to improvise. Cowell says the tears just started pouring out. When he turned to face the cast and crew, he found them all staring at him, the tears coursing down their cheeks.
"Jeremy yelled: ‘We're keeping it! We're keeping it!' and I thought, ‘Yeah, this is f—ing great,'" Cowell says. "Then I stopped and thought: ‘I have to do this for 70 nights.'"
Cowell can't explain what deep, dark well he dipped into night after night. When you look at his written body of work - take Bed, which earned him a share of the 2001 Patrick White Playwrights Award; ATM, which was commissioned for the 2002 Sydney Festival; and Rabbit, which opens next week in a Griffin Theatre Company production in Sydney - it seems safe to assume Cowell has experienced life's nastier side. His characters, while often extremely witty, are also acutely observed studies in death, drug addiction, family breakdowns- even the female psyche.
Rabbit, which won the 2003 Griffin Award, is a black comedy about a weekend family retreat gone wrong. The Griffin Theatre premiere is directed by Kate Gaul and stars William Zappa. "Rabbit was my attempt at naturalism," Cowell says. "It starts off in a house; two generations, they're talking. It's very normal, funny. Then it went where all my plays go - into this mad, macabre, surreal world. They just go there."
The 26-year old says he doesn't go out of his way to shock. What he is certain about, however, is the need to be provocative. "When you're watching a play, you have to ask yourself: ‘Why am I here? Why am I not at home watching this on TV or listening to radio? I've seen a lot of theatre I could easily watch on Channel Seven and there wouldn't be any difference. Theatre needs to go into another world. And it needs to be extreme."
As for Cowell's upbringing, it couldn't have been happier. He grew up at Sydney's beachside suburb of Cronulla, dividing his time between cricket practice with his dad and traipsing around ballet classes, eisteddfods and concerts with his two older sisters. He began television acting at eight and moved into film after graduating from university.
TV viewers know him as Todd the handyman in the SBS show Life Support and he has just finished shooting the quirky ABC TV drama Fat Cow Motel. Cowell is in the process of developing a feature film, Ten Empty, with collaborator Anthony Hayes. And there's more theatre to come - his fourth play, Bed, an often brutal story about a man searching for the meaning of love and life opens at the Old Fitzroy in Sydney in July, while his next work, Morph, premiers at the STC in November.
Cowell is filming Floodhouse, a 50 minute drama that will air on SBS this year, appearing alongside Robert Menzies and Catherine McClements, and he has a small part in a US TV remake of Stephen King's Salem's Lot, staring Rob Lowe.
Cowell is offhand about the success that followed the staging of his first play, Men, in 2000. "That was kind of it - I kept writing, won a couple awards, wrote a bit of telly, now I'm writing a couple of films."
Does he tire of being held up as the "bold, young exciting talent"?
"I do wonder when I'm going to stop being new," he says. "I'll probably always be bold. I don't know how long I'll be exciting for."