NOTES FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT

I have been in love with secret societies for as long as I can remember. There is something delightfully mischievous about them the lamplit meetings at midnight, the endless bread and wine consumed by hungry young (and not-so-young) rebels, and a general air of distrust and disrespect for authority which makes you want to punch the air and cheer. So when I read about the very real exploits of the Night Climbers of Cambridge in a 1937 edition of the unimaginatively-titled The Night Climbers of Cambridge I was enchanted by its cheerfully anarchic gaggle of boys, hauling themselves up gothic architecture by sheer willpower and a few conveniently-placed gargoyles

But beneath this gleeful rebellion was the underlying pulse of the climbers’ good fortune: they were white, rich, English and male in a world where those four things were the very best things to be As I read The Night Climbers of Cambridge, I looked for female students within their pages: they borrowed a skirt from one, for a prank in which they dressed up and scaled the women’s-only Newnham College; on a separate occasion, during a particularly bad climbing accident, one of them crashed through a skylight into a woman’s room

I thought of the irrepressible girls in the boarding-school stories I read while growing up: girls who were hungry and cheeky and slightly too enthusiastic; girls who were almost always placidly married off by the end of the series, at which point the book closed on them with an ominous thud I wondered what it would have been like to be a woman at a university which only grudgingly acknowledged your existence. What it would have been like for a friend to borrow your skirt for an adventure and not invite you along for the journey And I wondered more sinister now what it would have been like to have a man crash, like Icarus in plimsolls, through the skylight uninvited, in the dead of night while you were sleeping.

I’d like to warmly thank our extraordinary cast and crew for coming on this adventure with us, all the way from accents to acrobatics (I promise to never include "she effortlessly leaps from the balcony to the rooftop" in my stage directions again); the wonderful cast and crew of 2019’s season at Monash Uni Student Theatre, especially the mentorship of Yvonne Virsik and Jason Lehane; Dr. Fiona Gregory from Monash University who supervised the historical research of this play, and, finally, Fever103’s founders Monique Marani and Harry Dowling, who have been here with me since the beginning and treated this show with the utmost care and love.

Climbers is the culmination of two years’ research looking at the way we write about women’s coming of age stories in historical contexts It’s about a society teetering on the precipice of radical change and war and clinging desperately to tradition. It’s about the first moment as a young woman that something heart-stoppingly awful happens to you, and you realise there are no adults coming to help.

But it’s also about joy, and love, and friendship. It’s about speaking out, even if the only sound you can make is a whisper It’s about stargazing, and adventuring, and poetry, and the messy, traumatic, glorious, terrifying journey of growing up and taking your place in the wide world.

Elly D'Arcy