Delving into something so dark and ugly as the subject of high school rape is not an easy thing to do. I began thinking about writing Anaconda in January 2012 when the Penn State scandal in the US broke, and Gridiron head coach Joe Paterno was fired for covering up assistant coach Jerry Sandusky's sexual abuse of young boys. Supporters of Paterno and the Penn State football program picketed the school because of his discharge. I was appalled. I couldn't believe their loyalty outweighed their sense of right and wrong.

I have never forgotten the incidents at Trinity Grammar, the Sydney private boys boarding school. I went to sister school Meriden, and knew many people who went to Trinity. So when the story of boys being repeatedly sexually assaulted with handmade dildos surfaced in 2000, two years after I had finished, it hit close to home.

When I come across disturbing things, I write about them. The difficult, the hard, the painful, the stuff that people like to push under the carpet is what interests me. I began researching what happened at Trinity: looking into the perpetrators and victims, and interviewing former students who knew the boys involved and were present in the woodwork room where the "anaconda" was made. My play is a fiction, not set at Trinity, but it is prompted by what happened there.

I couldn't understand how a crowd could watch as a screaming victim was raped. I looked into the culture of "fagging", the boarding school hierarchy adopted by Australians from England. Could you be lulled into this culture if you were told it was somehow okay? The culpability of an inactive participant became a central theme. Abuse continues because bystanders fear blowing the whistle will put something greater at stake. Keeping abuses shrouded in silence and denial allows it to happen again and again.

I have been constantly challenged by unexpected facts about the abuse – that one of the victims was friends with the attackers, that the victims were not what one may consider "easy targets." And yet aside from all the hideous details, the question surfaced: how responsible can you really be for your actions as a teenager?

By the time I had digested everything, I had great empathy for all involved, but of course especially the victim. I wondered if he ever imagined killing his attacker. The light sentencing of the boys gave me a sense that these incidents are most protected at the higher echelons of our class structure. If this happened to poorer families, I wondered whether the 16-year-olds responsible would have been looking only at 12-month good behaviour bonds.

I wanted to know what the echoes from being part of something so traumatic would be in the lives of those involved, further down the line. What kind of adults would they become? Who would they tell about their role in the event? What would they say?

I began to write from that point. The aftermath. I wanted to give the victim a provocative character to face – someone who could have saved him from the abuse if he'd only spoken out. It was that dynamic of the survivor and the passive observer that I wanted to explore.

We all know guilt, shame, regret, desire, heartbreak and struggle, and we turn to stories to help us understand ourselves. The victims, the perpetrators, the bystanders, they are all in us. I also knew, as in all my plays, that humour is the only way to tell such a story, and so a sharp sense of the funny had to surface in every character. Australians have a healthy sense of humour and we turn to it to deal with, and heal from, tragedy.

I often wonder whether I would have written this play while living in Sydney – I wrote it in America, where it also premiered – because the idea of being so controversial may have outweighed the intense need I felt to write it.

If I am being totally honest, I'm scared about putting this play on here in Sydney. I suspect that the Trinity victims know about it. I presume the perpetrators and bystanders do too. I want them to know that this is a work of fiction, an imagining, and that I'm sorry if it brings up unwanted ghosts from the past. But I believe the play opens up a wider discussion about the aftermath of bullying and abuse, that dialogue is part of healing, and that this play can be a catalyst for that.

So I'm also excited about putting this play on, because it should be on here, Sydney needs to talk about this, because it's easier not to and silence is where scandal breeds.



• Anaconda will play at The Bondi Pavilion Theatre from 29 October to 23 November.