Q&A: On Milk

You've just been awarded the prestigious Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting for your work Milk and you also received both the Griffin Theatre Award and Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award. What does the Nick Enright Prize mean to you, and what can awards like these do for a playwright?

This has been most unexpected recognition, and I’m still reeling from receiving an award named for Nick Enright – one of our greatest writers for the stage.

In real terms, an award like this gives me the time and space to start work on the next project, removing some of the pressure we all feel as we try to balance carving out creative time with the things necessary to pay the bills. It’s also a vote of confidence in my work, which is lovely!

Milk has been described as a 'personal process of reconciliation' and you piece together a complicated, fragmented family history. What was the catalyst for you to decide to create something so personal, but so widely important?

Many years ago, I was working as an actor (which is perhaps an overstatement – I was trying to work as an actor…) and struggling to find roles that spoke to my community or reflected my experience. During the same period, I felt like I was constantly justifying or feeling the need to provide ‘proof’ of my heritage; as a fair-skinned blackfella, the way that I looked didn’t match up with what the idea of ‘blackness’ that folks had locked up in their brains. I decided to write the kind of play I longed to see on stage, which also tackled some of those difficult questions and conversations I’d been faced with in my daily life.

What sets playwriting apart from other disciplines of writing?

I’m sure the anxiety and deadlines are the same, but I suppose playwriting is the most collaborative of writing disciplines; on stage, an audience is seeing a version of your work that’s been filtered through a producer, a director, an actor, a designer. The relationship between writer and consumer is different – more distant? Less immediate? But still exhilarating.

Tell us a bit about the process of writing Milk and conceptualising the final-product

Writing this play has been a long journey; many years of false-starts and redrafting and developments with other artists and consultations with the wonderful Aunty Gaye Doolan. At some point, I realised I had three distinct plays that I wanted to write, and in a moment of insanity, decided to merge them together. What resulted was a more focused conversation about intergenerational attitudes to identity, and the lengths mob have had to go to for survival.

Who is Milk for, and what do you hope those who see it will take away with them?

Milk, I hope, is an illustration of healing and resilience for a First Nations audience, and an invitation to contribute to reconciliation for a non-Indigenous audience. I think a lot of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists try to create first and foremost for their communities, but also with a sense of hope that it ignites a productive conversation with our non-Indigenous sisters, brothers and siblings.

What are the core values that guide your writing, and some of the key responsibilities you carry as a playwright?

I’m guided by a sense of responsibility to my community, my ancestors and my family. I want to write stories that reflect the multitude of First Nations’ experiences and which give weight to Indigenous ways of knowing, make space for healing, and offer hope for a shared future.

The Street presents Milk by Dylan Van Den Berg

On the precipice of something life changing, a young Palawa man plunges into an exploration of self and Country. 

Opening Friday 4 June - Saturday 12 June

Thursday 3 June (Preview)

ACT Writers Night Thursday 10 June - unlock a special ACTW ticket price, thanks to The Street, using the special booking code ‘COUNTRY’ for this night only

Dylan Van Den Berg is a Palawa man, actor and writer based in Canberra. He graduated from ANU with a Bachelor of Arts (Drama) and trained in acting at the State University of New York, the Upright Citizens Brigade improvisation troupe (NYC) and the Canberra Youth Theatre senior ensemble. He is the winner of the 2021 Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting at the NSW Premiers Literary Awards and the 2020 Griffin Award for new Australian playwriting for his play: way back when.

Portrait of Dylan Van Den Berg, Creswick Collective