Guest Blog: Playwright Alana Valentine On THE SUGAR HOUSE

The polite term for it is urban renewal. Clearing away decaying housing where people live in unhygienic, overcrowded conditions. Upgrading sanitation, plumbing and infrastructure. All along the Sydney foreshores, and the London riverbanks, are areas where inner urban slums, old factories and buildings associated with former maritime activities have been transformed into luxury waterside apartments.

Many of them feature sensitive heritage conservation of 'historical' elements - rusting old machinery or archaeological remnants displayed in glass cases in entrance foyers or mounted on sandstone exteriors. The lives of the people who lived there before forgotten. Or are they?

My stage play The Sugar House uses the metaphor of gentrification of a former Sydney harbourside sugar refinery to explore the legacy of change for a woman who has come from poverty but now lives a completely transformed middle-class lifestyle. As the play opens we meet Narelle Macreadie, a law firm partner, as she accompanies a real estate agent on an inspection of a former sugar refinery, now developed as state-of-the-art apartments. A place, we soon learn, where her grandfather worked as a fitter and turner, maintaining the machines that helped turn raw sugarcane into refined white sugar.

Pretending to go back for her forgotten umbrella, Narelle spends the night in the renovated apartment, calling up visions of her desperately poor childhood with her divorced mother, criminal uncle, genial grandfather, and passionate, ambitious, haunted grandmother, June.

When the play was produced at Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre in 2018, the artistic director Eamon Flack told me that he'd never had so many conversations with the theatre subscribers, staff, audiences and creatives about where each of them had come from and what their families had done (or not done) to help them get to where they were today.

This is a play that provokes conversations about what I began to call 'the gentrification of the next generation'. It's an opportunity for people to talk about the enormous change that has happened over two generations in Australia (and I'm sure in London too) - from lice-infested children eating bread and dripping to shiny, social media-obsessed progeny.

Australia is a country where the urban poor used education to move across strict, rigidly enforced class lines and find a better life than their convict forebears. But having made a success of her life, having succeeded in an area of the law which her grandmother struggled for years to reform, having grown up in a country and a community where capital punishment is a long-forgotten distant threat, Narelle now questions what values and priorities she has discarded along the way.

As the story of her mother, her grandmother and her own life play out on the stage in all the humour and tragedy she has known, Narelle asks what her relationship to her own 'heritage features' is now. Is her history just a distant memory of disadvantage to keep her motivated to succeed? Or should her tough love past obligate her/inspire her to confront deeper social injustices? Can she ever be happy with individual success or will her past keep bubbling up to incite her to action, change and social progress all her life?

At the end of the play Margo, Narelle's mother, laments: "They tear everything down in this city, tear it down, gussy it up. We paid for this city like everyone else so why are we never listened to? Why are our memories and our sense of belonging so worthless in this city?"

The Sugar House invites you to reflect on your own life achievements, however humble, and celebrate where you have come from, on your way to where you are going next.

The Sugar House is at Finborough Theatre until 20 November - book tickets here

Photo credit: Pamela Raith

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