Brendan Cowell: Actor & Playwright
		The chicken or the egg? By Robin Usher The Age June 2, 2004
					Brooding Sydney playwright Brendan Cowell, whose play Happy New is about two men recovering from the trauma of being locked in a chicken coop as boys. Picture: Rodger Cummins
			Brendan Cowell's second play is about family, media, men and chooks, writes Robin Usher. Few people in Melbourne have heard of Brendan Cowell, which is surprising, given his status in Sydney as one of the most likely of his generation - he is 27 - to succeed. He has written six plays in four years, won numerous prizes and is now writing a 10-part TV series starring Claudia Karvan, as well as a film script for Mel Gibson's company, Icon. Melbourne is about to get its first taste of his work, Happy New, which opens this week at The Store Room in North Fitzroy. "I'm really happy to start on the fringe down here," he says. "I've come close to getting work performed in Melbourne before, but nothing has come of it. This is my second play and it's an ideal way to start." Happy New is about family life and the impact the media can have. Two brothers, played by Dai Paterson and Angus Samson, are preparing a list of new year's resolutions in the hope that they can make a new start and put behind them the scars of a traumatic event that made them media celebrities a decade earlier. They had been abandoned by their mother who left them locked in a chicken coop, where they spent four months before being found and released. "They ate all the chooks and everything else they could find in the pen and, unfortunately, they also took on the characteristics of chickens," Cowell says. "The question the play poses is which came first: the chooks' pecking order or human psychology?" The situation is complicated because this New Year's Eve is the last night before they have to vacate their housing commission flat, leaving them completely on their own except for the journalist girlfriend (Jude Beaumont) of the elder brother. "She is a younger Jana Wendt figure, who is just starting to make her way as a documentary maker," Cowell says. While there is laughter in Happy New, Cowell says his themes are not all satirical - the play also attempts to examine elements of brotherly affection. "The more I thought about it, the more I realised that humans are not that different to chickens - very proud, very productive, very noisy, very predictable, very competitive and very lost." Continued next page>>
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