Jacky

Title: Jacky

Author: Declan Furber Gillick

Publishers: Currency Press & Melbourne Theatre Company

‘Do you have anything at all that’s actually yours? That’s actually real?’

Jacky is a smart, enterprising young blackfella in the big city. He skillfully negotiates the gig economy, skipping neatly from office internships to cultural performances to sex work. When his unemployable little brother Keith rolls into town, Jacky’s carefully compartmentalised lives are set to collide.

Photography by Sarah Walker

Judges’ report

Viewing the world through a contemporary Pan-Aboriginal lens while expertly speaking to a broader audience, Declan Furber Gillick’s Jacky interrogates long-held and under-examined beliefs, prejudices and narratives about what it is to live a meaningful, valuable and dignified life in a world where so many relationships are distorted by capitalism and neoliberalism. The play strikes a fine balance between culpability and blame, comedy and discomfort, and in doing so offers us a stark mirror through which we can view and question our own thoughts and actions. We empathise, are surprised by that empathy, and are then starkly denied the false security of dipping into apologist attitudes. Furber Gillick explores the cost of living authentically in a world that wants and needs people to behave in a particular way, and powerfully represents the importance of family, community and home without resorting to didacticism or platitudes. A clarion call highlighting the ways privilege masks the ongoing degradation of marginalised communities, Jacky is an important play and a work of great humanity.