A Note From the Writer, Sarah Matthews

Sarah Matthews is a recent graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, where she completed her Master of Theatre (Writing). She is the recipient of the 2024 Canberra Youth Theatre’s Emerging Playwright Commission and has developed work through ATYP’s National Studio residency, VIMH’s ‘dinner and a show’ program, and MUST’s ‘From Scratch’ workshops. Sarah is enthusiastic about all things lovely and refuses to let her woeful eyesight prevent her from a career in theatre. ‘I Promise This Isn’t About You’ is Sarah’s debut play.

Propped up against my bedroom wall, directly under my windowsill, is a massive framed knock-off of Bouguereau's L'Amour et Psyché, enfants that I picked up off the side of the road a couple of days before my twenty-third birthday.

(Or, more specifically, my beautiful friend Tash picked up for me, because she was driving, the nature strip was muddy, and I didn't have any shoes on. Love you, Tashi.)

I was in the midst of a brief, yet enthusiastic, art upcycling phase, and spent hours cutting out photos of my friends and bedazzling them with sparkly stickers and glitter until the entire background of L'Amour was just a collage of what it looked like to be Sarah Matthews at twenty-two; i.e., a collage of me and my friends at house parties.

The best parts of those parties aren't captured in the photos, of course.

They're in the side quests before, during, and after, the things that happened when we were busy not being at the party.

Getting ready beforehand in my best friend's bedroom, eating spicy dumplings on the floor. Skipping out halfway through someone's birthday to go for a swim in the puddle we generously call St Kilda beach and returning, very damp and missing an earring, two hours later. Locking ourselves in my parents' pantry so we can gossip about someone directly outside the door. Driving my little sister and a couple of her very drunk friends home, making them listen to Phoebe Bridgers' Motion Sickness in some strange attempt at reverse psychology. Making spaghetti carbonara in someone else's kitchen, drinking someone else's wine. Stopping by the children's playground on the way home and swinging on the swings. Sitting in the hallway on my twenty third birthday, holding the hands of two of my best friends and just feeling so, so happy.

There's a very hazy quality to these memories. They're just little fragments of time, captured on shitty disposable cameras and dirty iPhone screens. But every time I sat down on my bed to write, and I didn't know what to write next, I'd look up at that well-intentioned but vaguely cursed scrapbook of my friends, and think: this is how we ended up here.

So, to those brilliant, wonderful, ridiculous friends – I think I lied, a little bit, when I promised this play wasn’t about you. I think, at its core, it is, because this play is a love letter to house parties, and those house parties were love letters to you.

After all, if you're not laugh-crying with your best mates in someone's grotty share house toilet, what's the point?

-Sarah