Rosie and Tom are seemingly a typical, loved-up 20-something couple — but life is life. Photo: Children of the Revolution.
Twenty years after it was first penned, Wollongong playwright Siobhán Doran-Chaston’s play Two Weeks transcended the semi-autobiographical to be, at times, borderline prophetic.
Two full decades after its conception, the production is finally set to take the stage later this month at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre (IPAC).
At the time of writing, the parallels between the author and her work were simple. Siobhán was living with her now-husband in a London sharehouse, mirroring her protagonists Rosie and Tom — a seriously loved-up, screenwatching, couch-rotting, 20-something couple who spend their nights riffing on everything and nothing.
As the pair finds a quiet magic in the mundane, a countdown begins toward a cataclysmic event that threatens to change everything.
Ironically, sometimes eerily, Siobhán is now much better placed to understand the experiences of these ill-fated characters than when she first created them.
“I’m now 49, and many of the things I wrote about in the play, I came to personally experience later in life,” she says.
“About 10 years after writing that Rosie’s dad passed away from a heart attack, I lost my dad the same way.
“The scenes hit deeper now. I have seen more of the strange, unpredictable beast that is life.”
Two Weeks actors Nathan Langworthy and Jess Spies with Merringong’s Anne-Louise Rentell and playwright Siobhán Doran-Chaston. Photo: Siobhán Doran-Chaston.
Two Weeks was developed through the 2023 South Coast Writers Centre and Merrigong Playwrights Program, as well as the MerrigongX 2024/25 artist development program.
Billed as a play about “everything and nothing”, it initially strikes audiences as a refreshingly ordinary slice of life that, much like reality, can lull the viewer into a false sense of security.
Siobhán conceived the piece while working as a theatre usher, where she found herself craving a realism to balance the more polished, scaled-up productions.
“I wanted to see real, flawed, relatable characters and plots,” she says.
“There’s a resistance to that in conventional storytelling, where everything is fine, then conflict hits, then a resolution. That’s not life.”
While skinned in the everyday, scratch the surface and this is a play about life, death and the universe at large.
Without giving too much away, Siobhán hints that anyone living with neurodivergence, medical trauma or chronic illness will feel deeply seen.
“Ultimately, I hope people walk away realising that even the most mundane moments can become magical in hindsight,” she says.
“It’s not easy to appreciate it at the time, but it’s a good reminder to try.”
The play runs at IPAC from Thursday 28 to Saturday 30 May. There is no set price; simply reserve a spot, show up and pay what you feel the performance is worth afterwards.
