VPLA 2024
Jacky

Title: Jacky

Author: Declan Furber Gillick

Publishers: Currency Press & Melbourne Theatre Company

‘Do you have anything at all that’s actually yours? That’s actually real?’

Jacky is a smart, enterprising young blackfella in the big city. He skillfully negotiates the gig economy, skipping neatly from office internships to cultural performances to sex work. When his unemployable little brother Keith rolls into town, Jacky’s carefully compartmentalised lives are set to collide.

Photography by Sarah Walker

Judges’ report

Viewing the world through a contemporary Pan-Aboriginal lens while expertly speaking to a broader audience, Declan Furber Gillick’s Jacky interrogates long-held and under-examined beliefs, prejudices and narratives about what it is to live a meaningful, valuable and dignified life in a world where so many relationships are distorted by capitalism and neoliberalism. The play strikes a fine balance between culpability and blame, comedy and discomfort, and in doing so offers us a stark mirror through which we can view and question our own thoughts and actions. We empathise, are surprised by that empathy, and are then starkly denied the false security of dipping into apologist attitudes. Furber Gillick explores the cost of living authentically in a world that wants and needs people to behave in a particular way, and powerfully represents the importance of family, community and home without resorting to didacticism or platitudes. A clarion call highlighting the ways privilege masks the ongoing degradation of marginalised communities, Jacky is an important play and a work of great humanity.

Extract

About the author

Photo credit Sydney Morning Herald

Declan Furber Gillick is a multidisciplinary artist from Mparntwe (Alice Springs) and a proud Arrernte man with Irish-Australian heritage. His practice spans writing, theatre, poetry, music, rap, film, television and visual arts. Declan will be making his Melbourne Theatre Company debut with Jacky. Other credits include Scar Trees (Ilbijerri Theatre Company) and Bighouse Dreaming (Melbourne Fringe Festival). He is currently working as part of a First Nations writing team to adapt Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Too Much Lip for television. Bighouse Dreaming was awarded the Green Room Award for Best Independent Writing and Best Ensemble, Melbourne Fringe Awards for Best Performance Work and Best Writing, Melbourne Festival Discovery Award and Best Emerging Indigenous Artist. In 2018 he took up a residency as part of Melbourne Theatre Company’s Next Stage Writers’ Program. He has also worked with Melbourne Theatre Company’s First Peoples Young Artist Program. Declan completed a Masters of Writing for Performance at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2017.