Strange Attractor

At gold mining settlements in the Pilbara, deep in Australia's rugged northwest, not much emphasis is placed on the social niceties. Men, money and boredom make for a volatile combination and loneliness and isolation prevail. So what happens when a cyclone rips through a remote railway construction camp, forcing a small group of employees - equipped with little more than Bundy Rum - to seek refuge together in a makeshift mess hall?

Strange Attractor is the second stage work by Sydney-based screenwriter Sue Smith, whose first play, Thrall (2006), was partly set in a Kalgoorlie brothel. "I am endlessly fascinated by the world the West creates," Smith explains. "It's like the rules of civilisation don't apply out there... [In Strange Attractor] I wanted to focus on what happens to people when they are without emotional sustenance from their families, and away from civilising influences. It's about looking at how they cope with their splintered lives and the choices they make in search of a dollar."

"Gobsmacked" by the scale of the mining boom on her first visit to the Pilbara, Smith chose the title of the play as a metaphor for the "cyclonic power and centrifugal force" of the gold rush. Her characters were inspired by her first-hand encounters with locals and the fly-in, fly-out workers. The tough-talking supply driver and single mum ‘Truckie' was the product of a questionnaire Smith sent out to female workers, enquiring about their coping mechanisms in a male-dominated environment, while ‘Philly' - the Filipino cook - was born from Smith's interest in the experiences of foreigners placed in temporary work visa programs.

Among the narratives in the play, Smith singles out the love story as her favourite. "It's a ‘ships in the night' relationship - it's about lonely people in isolated places seeking comfort wherever it can be had."

While Smith's many screen credits include the popular ABC miniseries Bastard Boys and The Leaving of Liverpool, she admits she is still daunted by the theatre. "I find the screen imposes a literalness on the material, whereas in the theatre, it's all bets off. Anything goes," she says. "With a stroke of a pen, I can create a cyclone - it's much harder re-creating that on stage."

Working closely with director Nick Marchand and designer Jo Briscoe, Smith aims to give a sense of outback Australia's unforgivingly harsh landscape. "The play comments on the irony that fate seems to put the most valuable things in the most difficult place possible," she says. "The people who come here are locked in golden handcuffs. It's an environment where they can set themselves up for life, or they can come unstuck." Millie Churcher

Griffin's Strange Attractor plays at the SBW Stables Theatre 23 Oct-21 Nov and Riverside Theatres 24-28 Nov.