ANY thought that Suzanne Hawley’s play “Wild Thing”, coming to The Q soon, was a kids’ play, is much mistaken.

The play is billed as “a tale of sea eagles and pole dancing, of children and childhood dreams, of religion and rock ‘n roll” and The Q’s publicity features the cast in school uniforms.

But “Wild Thing” is very much an adult work as it zooms in on a group of friends aged well past 60, who face a challenge to their long-standing friendship.

When I catch up by phone to Sydney with producer Di Smith, who also plays the pivotal role of Jackie, and Katrina Foster as her friend Frances, I find they see it as a comedy and tragedy – a “dramedy”. Not just that, it’s got an age recommendation of 18+.

The subject, lifelong friendship, is about leading a big life, they say, but also, it’s a memory play, involving people who have been friends for 40 years, who have seen each other’s relationships, birthdays, and babies, “a serious subject, but with a very comic telling”, Foster says.

Smith and Foster say the characters are definitely not them, but there’s a personal backstory.

Very briefly, Jackie, Elizabeth, Frances and Susan have been at school, meet up again in Swingin’ England, and after that convene once a year for what they call the “Musketeers” dinner.

Now Jackie is in crisis, and they all head to her country home to help her, but in time-honoured showbiz fashion, the actors will say no more, telling me we’ll all just have to be at The Q to know what happens next. 

A hint is that the play asks the important question: “How far would you go for a friend?” 

Smith, a long-time actor perhaps best known as Dr Alex Fraser in “A Country Practice”, is also a seasoned film producer and she’s the one who successfully negotiated the 11-stop tour with Arts on Tour, which will see them in Queanbeyan in a production directed by Kim Hardwick. 

While just 20 and fresh out of the National Institute of Dramatic Art, she shared a flat with Hawley, then acting at the Ensemble Theatre in Milson’s Point but now an AFI-winning screenwriter. They’ve been friends ever since.

Fast forward to 2017 and Smith found herself sitting with old NIDA mates Foster and the late Penny Cook around the kitchen table of another NIDA graduate, Lewis Fitz-Gerald, who plays “Geoff and everyone else” in the coming show.

They all said: “Let’s collaborate on something’” and Smith said she’d just read a new play. 

Cook, who died in 2018, was a prominent advocate for new works and always talked about how she wanted playwrights to write leading roles for women in their 60s, where the humour is very particular. Hawley’s script looked perfect. 

They read the play together in Fitz-Gerald’s kitchen, after which, with the help of Hawley, Smith tried to get it produced.

“Then I thought, I’ll do an indie production,” she says. 

Covid intervened, but they eventually got it up at Flight Path Theatre at Marrickville in 2021 in what she calls “the magic mix of a perfect company”.

While being about lifelong female friendship, it naturally appealed to women. Young people came to the show at Flight Path, too, some saying things such as: “I want to go home and be a better friend”.

“Wild Thing,” The Q, Queanbeyan, April 28-29.