Trying to make prosecutors sexy

Lawyer, rigger, runner, stagehand, actress and screenwriter ... Creator of Janet King ... A pitch for marriage equality ... Legal drama powered by family strife and prosecutorial tensions ... Parenting imperfectly ... Exaggerated reality ... Gudrun Willcocks catches-up with Jane Allen beachside  

Jane Allen: close-upJane Allen, 57, the screenwriter of some 20 Australian television shows and three legal dramas is spooning through a glossy bowl of muesli and fruit at the Clovelly kiosk. It's a Monday morning in November. An immaculate Spring day, sharp and light, and she has swum a kilometre-and-a-half with a group of icebreakers. 

"Nature helps me get out of my head," she explains. "It's my meditation." 

Allen is from Melbourne but in turn with her adopted Sydney she sports an athletic look. She wears black activewear, Ray-Ban sunglasses perched over grey blue eyes and a crop of silver hair that is already dry. When she speaks, it is in a clear, measured tone that rises into enthusiasm and falls into deadpan. 

Sydney's ocean-scape, she describes as a form of theatre. On a good day, she'll sweep through the water, watching gropers, gars and stingrays performing with idiosyncratic grace. On a murky day, after a storm perhaps, it's like crawling through sand, but the practise remains worthwhile. 

As someone who spends their day moving in and out of people's heads, it's also preparation. 

"In another life I might have been a psychologist," she says without irony. 

Allen instead earned an arts-law degree from Melbourne University. She has worked as a runner, stagehand, arts-administrator, actress, stage-manager, criminal and corporate lawyer respectively; then screenwriter and producer.

She is best-known for co-creating the first lesbian lead on prime-time Australian television - Janet King, the formidable crown-prosecutor played by Marta Dusseldorp, and the series in her name is playing on Netflix and Stan.

"All the jobs I've done have been about language and love of language and using stories to influence someone or convince them of a particular point of view ... I've always been prone to pedantry." 

Allen's career as a criminal defence lawyer was relatively short: 18 months. Long enough to know she enjoyed appearance work. There was the drama of the courtroom - she says she studied the law because of the implied wordplay - but it was the purpose that inspired her: advocating on behalf of people she saw as victims of the system. Screenwriting, she believes, is underpinned by the same intent. 

"The law involves prosecution of ideas." So does fiction. 

In Janet King, one of the themes is parenting. Janet parents crime-victims. She is cold at times, and attentive to the extent her priorities seem misplaced at others. She mothers twins with loving imperfection alongside her long-term partner, Ash.

Janet earns the household income and Ash performs the bulk of the parenting. In a classic domestic tyrst, they struggle to connect as pressures of their respective responsibilities escalate. Then there is Jack Rizzolli, the Chief Superintendent played by Vince Colosimo. He displays what Allen calls "perverted parenting of the state," which means he believes in his own omnipotence. 

All the narrative threads have their subtexts. With Janet and Ash, Allen's intention was to present a lesbian couple as conventional. "I wanted it to be 'It's no big deal". Gay couples have the same tensions, relationship issues and work stress as everyone else. 

"Janet was my pitch for marriage equality for the show got going, but it wasn't the thing that drove the show." 

Moral complexity is what drives the show and the central dilemma could be refined as something like this: Janet strives for decency; her work-ethic is vigilance; and she is humanised by her tendency to overreach in almost every aspect of her life. 

"Shall we ease back on your workload for the first few weeks?" asks Tracey, the office-clerk when Janet returns from maternity leave in episode one. 

"No, no. No special treatment," Janet replies crisply. 

Janet's home life rapidly turns to chaos as she applies herself to several cases at one time. Meanwhile, viewers are left wondering whether pride or the need to hold her own in the patriarchal office is what motivates her. This makes for much of the drama. 

Marta Dusseldorp as Janet King: too many cases

"What interested me with Janet King was that it was lawyers from the prosecution point of view," Allen tells me. 

Legal dramas tend to follow defence lawyers. Damages, Criminal Justice, The Night of, The Good Wife, Suits, Proven Innocents, For the People and Rake are standout examples.

This is because they have access to defendants who are easier to develop into story Allen tells me. "If you have rational people making sensible decisions, there would be no drama," she says leaning back in one of the café's metal chairs.  

Developing prosecution into television is more challenging. "It's not immediately sexy," Allen says. The internal conflict with the lawyers is subtle and the most powerful scenes - committing the crime or conducting the investigation - have already taken place by the time the cases are evaluated for trial. They become backstory.

To achieve dramatic tension Allen and her co-writer Hilary Bonney, a Melbourne-based barrister, applied psychological pressure to the prosecutors, mainly through their work, and then sustained it for eight hour-long episodes.  

"All of its based in reality, it's just exaggerated," Bonney explains over the phone. 

"We don't want to watch you sitting in your cubicle highlighting with an orange highlighter for a couple of hours." 

Allen was 30 years old, when she decided to capitalise on her law degree. She had organised a small theatre group that played at Anthill and although she relished the stage's spontaneity, the promise of a living wage appealed. She enrolled in a nine-month course at Leo Cussen in Melbourne. Her focus was criminal defence advocacy and she was thrilled by the offer of work-placement with solicitor John Tobin. "A great man." 

Within two weeks, he offered her a job. 

"He said to me he felt it was his duty to try and employ as many eccentrics as possible." 

Clovelly, the concrete beach close to nature 

And if she hadn't been fired, Allen believes she would probably by now be a barrister. That was the plan, but Tobin, whose oeuvre was Legal Aid and pro bono cases, couldn't afford to keep her. She left and by that evening found herself rigging for The Phantom of the Opera. 

She tried corporate law. Slater + Gordon was running breast implant litigation against the manufacturers and she was offered a temporary position with the class action team. Eighteen months later she was assisting on the Sondheim musical A Little Night Music. 

Lisa McCune was the lead on the musical. At the time, she was also playing Senior Constable Maggie Doyle in Blue Heelers and in passing, she mentioned the role of gofer was coming up.

It was hardly a promotion, running around doing everything that nobody else wanted to do, but Allen was a contender. Within two years, she had a seat at the writer's table. In 20 years, she is leading scripts on dramas that make the most of her short, sharp repartee and her law degree too. 

Allen sees it as all the more reason to keep swimming.