In Michel Tremblay’s Le Vrai Monde? (The Real World?), a playwright angers his parents by writing a fictionalised version of their family life. Tremblay juxtaposes the “real” and invented characters on the same stage – one lot plain speaking, the others exaggerated and obvious.
Something similar happens in Kelly Jones’s unexpectedly funny play about grief. At its centre is Abigail Waller, a hard-up dramatist who bows to the demands of a middle-class director who wants to see a “gritty” version of her working-class life. He has no interest in the fanciful fiction of Astro Mite, her play about gay bugs in space, despite having told her to go anywhere her imagination takes her.
