Solstice: the Play

by Matt Rubinstein

Solstice is a novel in verse set over the twenty-four hours of the longest day of the year, in Adelaide, South Australia. It is a story of love and exploration told in sonnet form, one verse for each few minutes of the day. It shows how much can change in a day -- the whole world, and at the same time nothing at all.The stage version of Solstice was commissioned by the South Australian Theatre Company in conjunction with Magpie Theatre and was first performed in Barrie Kosky’s 1996 Adelaide Festival, directed by Neill Gladwin. It starred Kate Ceberano, Nadine Garner, Kate Kendall, Mark Saturno, Jules Sobotta, Bronwen James and Phil Spruce, and featured live jazz by Barney McAll, Jonathan Zwartz and Hamish Stuart.In the original production, the sonnets of the play are spoken by the characters and half-spoken, half-sung by the Chorus. The jazz was half-scored, half-improvised, and the production was staged outdoors in the amphitheatre at the Adelaide Festival Centre. Its capacity of around 2,000 seats was sold out almost every night, though one performance was cancelled due to rain.The original production used eight actors and three musicians; this could easily be reduced to five actors with doubling and all actors participating in the chorus. Alternatively it could be expanded to a larger group with a full chorus of many voices. It would be ideal for students studying Shakespeare due to the sonnet form of the play and the references to A Midsummer Night's Dream.Solstice is free to license for free performances, but please notify the publisher if you are staging it; for paid performances, please contact the publisher for a licence.

114 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 12, 2012

About the author

I started writing when I was six years old. "Writing" for me meant typing out Enid Blyton books on an old typewriter, word-for-word. Later I learned that writing was more than typing, it was invention; but I also heard that great writers like Hunter S Thompson had also copied out books like The Great Gatsby, in order to feel their construction from the inside.

When I was eleven my mother became a writer, and later she became another writer: first the children's author Gillian Rubinstein, and then the historical fantasy writer Lian Hearn. She taught me the true occupation of writing: I read early drafts of her books and saw the way she revisited and refined them, turning them from ideas into great stories.

At university I wrote a novel in sonnet form inspired by Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. That book was Solstice, which was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel literary award for unpublished manuscripts and later published by Allen & Unwin. I was asked to turn it into a play for the Adelaide Festival; I was lucky enough to work with some of Australia's best actors and musicians. After that I wrote Nomad, a novel based loosely on my travels in Europe, and it was published by Hyland House.

I then wrote Death of the Author, a post-modern serial killer thriller about a sinister character called The Reader who hunts down writers gathered for a festival of "multiple homicide fiction" in Adelaide. It was accepted by a publisher who then restructured and stopped publishing fiction; and it got me an agent who retired shortly afterwards. The book had kind of fallen between the cracks but I published it as an e-book this year.

I wrote a sequel to Solstice called Equinox, which was serialised on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald and which I am now tweeting over the course of a year. At the same time I wrote a literary mystery novel featuring an untranslatable manuscript that has a dangerous effect on anyone who tries to translate it, a little like the real-life Voynich manuscript. That book was runner-up for the Vogel award and was published as A Little Rain on Thursday in Australia by Text, as Vellum in the UK by Quercus, and by various European publishers.

While working on my most recent novel I became interested in the opportunities technology presents for writers and readers: I built my website, started to use Twitter, and wrote and spoke a lot about the future of the book. In 2012 I won the Calibre Award for my extended essay "Body and Soul: Copyright Copyright Law and Enforcement in the Age of the Electronic Book", which argues that traditional publishers are in real danger from alternative publishing models. I'm now putting my money where my mouth is and experimenting with electronic publishing.