FUNNY things, epiphanies. They've a habit of turning up just when you least expect them, blinking into hand-me-down anecdotal light and becoming something else entirely, something bigger, en route. And if there's an actress involved, so much the better.
Take Skye Loneragan, for instance. There she was, new Aussie in town, hitting the Edinburgh Fringe, getting to grips with the local currency, not to mention the vagaries of the pop-in-the-slot change/ticket machine interface on the local public transport carriage of choice, when that irascible, stony-faced thing that passes for Scottish wit ups and grabs her by surprise.
''Hit it,'' says the driver, leading Loneragan to believe that a sharp rap on the side of the machine would release the ticket in question, ergo allowing said double-decker to depart. ''No. Harder,'' comes the dour response of the man behind the wheel, taking advantage of the foreigner abroad after a cautious knock-knock bears no fruit.
''He really had me going for a minute,'' Loneragan recalls of this minor distraction from her theatrical pilgrimage, ''and I just thought, bless him, you know. These people are funny.''
Such a penchant for the wry is essential to Loneragan's work as both writer and performer, and is what makes her darkly comic solo miniature, Cracked, revived at Glasgow's Tron Theatre this week, so appealing. Told through the eyes of Hope, a teenage girl holed up in a seaside outback shack with her father, domestic co-dependence is complicated by his demented God-like
tendencies and a daily routine of swimming out to sea, only to be rescued at sunset in a kill-or-cure type scenario.
''I wanted to ask how you grieve someone who's still alive,'' Loneragan says of a work that doesn't instantly strike one as a barrel of laughs. ''It was originally a lot bleaker, but then became something very different. But, given my own experiences, I didn't want to do an autobiographical show.''
As her own father is a schizophrenic who, like the lost patriarch in Cracked, genuinely believes that he's God, you can see Loneragan's point.
''It's a really common survival trait,'' she says of the inherent humour in the piece, her own gigglesome demeanour deflecting from her clearly serious explorations of the everyday psyche, which also came through in My Right Thumb, a second piece about a hypochondriac, performed earlier this year at The Arches.
''There is so much that's funny about the tragic, or at least our ways of coping with it. To be honest, there were bits and pieces of writing that I'd collected that were humorous episodes regarding that experience, and I wanted to write a story that included that humour. After that, it's easy to imagine the life this girl has in the middle of nowhere living with this nutso father whom she adores and who adores her, but has somehow faded from her realm. But, no, that wasn't me
rowing out to sea or anything like that.''
Cracked first attracted attention
during a short run last year's Edinburgh Fringe, when Loneragan was performing under the auspices of RSAMD, where she'd won a scholarship to study for an MA after studying drama in her native Sydney, a metropolis she bemoans for its macho sporting culture, despite a marginalised but thriving theatre scene.
By the time she upped sticks, Loneragan, named by her mother after ''a blonde, blue-eyed kid on the beach'', had already fallen under the spell of Theatre de Complicitie, clearly her
theatrical gurus, whose ensemble approach make Loneragan's accidental shift to solo work a surprising, if not downright scary, prospect.
''Fear is the one thing that makes me sure I should do something,'' she says of her primary motivation. ''I think it obstructs a lot of things we really want to do, but it's like a litmus test for me. If it's dangerous, and I'm putting myself on the line, then it's worthwhile.''
One suspects such willingness to fly parachute-free stems as much from Loneragan's spiritual leanings as much as a need for self-expression. For a time she joined the Seventh Day Adventist Church with her mother, following her parents' divorce, and once climbed a tree in order to ''get nearer to God''.
''It was a very joyous time for me,'' she admits, ''before I realised life was a bit more complicated than climbing up there with my bean bag. Even so, it was all about hope. People can survive a long time on that, clinging to something in that way.''
Declaring herself ''more pantheist than atheist,'' these days, ''very ambiguous about religion'', she seems to lean more towards less dogmatically defined Buddhist ideas.
''Buddhism has a hell of a lot to offer in terms of living in the now,'' she says, with an upward inflection that implies a question-mark at the end of her sentence. As an actress, such imperatives are obvious, ''accepting that you want things, but trying to concentrate on the here and now on stage''.
Her former life up a tree is something she equates more with escapism rather than ambition. ''If I'm this far away from the household, I'm in another realm and I'm much closer to the stars,'' she says.
Loneragan says she's ''ridiculously ambitious,'' despite a wariness. ''Ambition can be seen as dissatisfaction, because, in order to want to go somewhere, you've got to be unhappy with where you're at,'' she says, sounding unfeasibly chirpy.
''And what if, what if,'' she stresses, voice rising, ''you chase after all you've ever wanted, and run like hell to get there, but when you get it you're still not completely happy?''
Which, in keeping with the integrity of Loneragan's work over the ephemera of fame, sounds like another not so stupid question.
As well as doing Cracked, Loneragan is currently knee-deep in development of a brand new piece with Pauline Goldsmith, herself a purveyor of finely-honed solo turns. The future beyond that is as uncertain as that for any twentysomething actress, though more mainstream ensemble work has obvious appeal.
In the meantime, she's taking Cracked to Canada, another place a long way from home. Still in Australia, Loneragan's father hasn't seen Cracked, although he is aware of it,
lobbing the occasional amused remark into conversations with his daughter
at a perceived life/art interface. Loneragan isn't sure what his response would be if he ever made it to the show,
but hopes that ''he'd find the situation hilarious. He's a very clever man,
too, and I know he's been told about
the piece, but you're never entirely
sure how self-aware he is. In a way, even though it's not autobiograph-
ical, it's still easier to do away from
the family.''
And what if, perish the thought,
Loneragan runs out of questions she wants to ask herself? ''I doubt it very much,'' she says after much silent perusal. ''Unless I become completely complacent in life - and some people would argue that means you're happy - I just don't see how there can't be something. But if that ever did happen, and I did go dry, I guarantee there'll be someone to bounce off. That's how things grow.''
Here's hoping.
Cracked, The Changing House, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, from tomorrow until Saturday, 8.30pm.
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