This playwright can say in 70 minutes what others need 500 pages for

Once upon a time we imagined a future in which we all wore identical jumpsuits. Nowadays, we all just sound the same. Every character in the Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars universes speaks in the same quippy manner. Our literary scene is dominated by novels written in an identical, stripped-back and unaffected voice. It’s even become impossible to tell if your online customer service assistant is human or not.

It comes as a welcome tonic, then, to hit upon a writer for whom character is everything. Melbourne playwright and actor Benjamin Nichol is just that. “Character is the thing I really geek out on, and I love getting deep into it,” he says.

He’s got the chops to back up that interest. His past two plays, kerosene and SIRENS, scored multiple Green Room and Fringe Festival awards and alerted critics to a compelling new talent in Australian theatre. Both were works for a solo performer, allowing audiences the time to get to know all the complexities and contradictions of a character going through great tribulations.

The plays weren’t conceived as a double bill, but subsequent productions have presented them back-to-back. His latest two works, Milk and Blood, have been created as companion pieces. There are no literal connections between the two, but deeper resonances arise when they’re played in tandem.

“It was an intentional pairing,” he says. “They’re very different stories, but I was interested in how, through a similar design and similar style of writing, it’ll bring out surprising similarities and differences. We always knew that Milk would be first and Blood would be second, and it’s allowed us to craft not only an arc through one story but an arc across both.”

Milk follows a mother of two whose love knows no boundaries, but who is put through the gravest of trials by a tragedy that only slowly reveals itself. Blood gives us a professional male escort specialising in BDSM, and whose deep understanding of care and consent conceals a blindness to aspects of his own identity he hasn’t yet confronted.

Milk and Blood will be performed by Brigid Gallacher and Charles Purcell respectively, and Nichol wrote both with his actors in mind.

“When I can write a three-line paragraph about what [a play] is about, then I feel secure enough to talk to an actor that I may be interested in collaborating with and seeing if they want to be involved. And then if they do want to be involved, that’s when the ball really starts to get rolling for me.”

He begins by presenting his actor with the character in rough form and the key points of drama they will face. He takes a pass at a few scenes and they begin to workshop them, slowly building up to a full draft. Once rehearsals begin properly, much of that text will be up for change, and each character’s voice will become more and more distinct.

It’s a process that certainly pays off. On paper, at least, Milk and Blood hum with life, their characters as fully realised as anyone you’d find in a 500-page literary classic. What’s most intriguing about these 70-minute plays is how Nichol has written two characters whose situations are so distant to his own, but who nonetheless seem torn from real life.

“That’s what I find exciting as an artist. It’s doing the thing that’s a stretch beyond yourself. I’ve no interest in writing memoir,” he says.

Writing as a way of extending the self might explain his commitment to collaboration. The amount of input his performers provide is such that Gallacher and Purcell share billing with Nichol as co-directors, and provide dramaturgy for the monologue in which they’re not appearing.

“A lot of the time when you’re directing or writing, it can feel like it’s just you. It’s nice having a totally shared show with someone,” Nichol says.

‘Support and care is talked about a lot in my family. It’s a thing I think about a lot. And I think it’s a thing we’re not naturally all very good at.’

Benjamin Nichol

Many writers prefer solitude, but Nichol’s interest in creation as a shared act makes more sense when you consider that he began his theatrical career as an actor. “I’m a really social person. I love storytelling, but I don’t love the act of writing. Sitting at a desk I find quite painful. But I love the brainstorming and discussions about something, sitting around a table trying to fix a moment that’s not working.”

His acting background also informs the kind of performers he seeks out. He’s been impressed by Gallacher and Purcell on stage, but he’s also shared development rooms with them and has seen their work as directors and dramaturges themselves. “I’ve heard the way they can interpret texts and speak to human behaviour within stories that I’ve found really compelling and challenging,” he says.

Milk and Blood contain confronting themes, but both are written with a genuine care for the figures at their heart. Milk’s protagonist undergoes ordeals that would break many of us, but her ability to see silver linings borders on a superpower.

“[Her] story could easily be so sad,” says Nichol. “To have her as really optimistic and actually trying her best, and her love being the thing that fuels her, made for a more complex character but also a more active story. A character who’s depressed, it’s hard for them to propel a narrative along, but one who is positive to the point of actually ignoring facts in front of her, there’s something interesting there.”

Blood’s narrator is just as nuanced. “I’m really interested in how we as a society care for each other. I was interested in that piece by someone who sees themselves as a carer, sees sex as the way they care for people, but actually can’t receive it very well.”

Nichol’s profound empathy for his characters might be a reflection of his own upbringing. His mother is a social worker, his father a school counsellor. Outside the arts, he works in the disability sector, as does his brother, while his sister is also training to become a social worker.

“Support and care is talked about a lot in my family,” he says. “It’s a thing I think about a lot. And I think it’s a thing we’re not naturally all very good at.”

Nichol envisions Milk and Blood as the third and fourth in a series of eight monologues, each exploring a very different character. He already has ideas for the next two, which are as radically different to what he’s already written as Milk and Blood are from what came before.

How they shape up will ultimately depend on the actors he finds to realise them. “I like that way of working. It removes ego and hierarchy a little bit. That shared problem-solving I really enjoy. We’re all in this together.”

Milk and Blood are at fortyfivedownstairs from August 15.