Anything can happen when blind dates don’t work out. Just ask Van Badham, arguably one of Australia’s most provocative playwrights and commentators, whose latest show is one of State Theatre Company South Australia’s flagship winter productions.

Partly, Badham’s own dating adventures led to the The Questions; it’s also how she met Richard Wise, clinical psychologist by day, punk folk musician, lyricist and the musical’s composer by night. ‘Richard and I met on Tinder,’ says Badham. ‘We were dating, but it wasn’t working, and I couldn’t work out why, because we were so into one another. I was obsessed with Richard’s band, and Richard was into my writing, so we had this profound connection, but as a relationship it just didn’t work.

‘I had this moment of clarity where I realised we were musical theatre collaborators. No two people can be this obsessed with Joanna Newsom and have these long conversations about modern folk music without being in an artistic relationship. It made me realise Tinder is a great place for meeting artistic collaborators, because you’re essentially meeting a different version of yourself.’

With both now happily married to other people, The Questions is their dating legacy: a two-handed musical romcom where a woman with a master’s degree in Gender Studies hooks up with a man who thinks Jordan Peterson would make an ideal dinner party guest. When they start to go their very separate ways, outside forces intervene: a global catastrophe forces them to quarantine together for perhaps the longest first date in history. To ease the subsequent domestic warfare, they turn to Arthur Aron’s 36 questions, devised as part of an experiment and supposedly proven to generate intimacy.

‘Richard and I did a show in Adelaide called Late Night Story,’ Badham explains. ‘I told him about the experiment. We thought it was a brilliant idea for a small-scale musical about two people building this relationship with one another, and experiencing all that pain, joy, bliss and trauma with another person.’

The show’s key came when Badham appeared on TV during lockdown. ‘I couldn’t quite work out the hook,’ Badham remembers, ‘but one of the stories we talked about was this couple in China who went on a blind date and got locked in the building by the Chinese government. Even though the date was a disaster, they were trapped. All of a sudden they’d gone from being on this disastrous date, to essentially co-habiting in a non-sexual version of a marriage, within minutes.’

But Badham insists: ‘This is not a lockdown show. It’s a show about two people in an extraordinary circumstance where, through no choice of their own, they become everything to one another and have to find a way to negotiate that process.’

With State Theatre artistic director Mitchell Butel helming the production, the cast features former Doctor Doctor regular Charles Wu alongside rising star Chaya Ocampo, who appeared in Katy Warner and Zoe Rinkel’s musical, Girl Band.  ‘Charles is a dream and Chaya is a force of nature,’ Badham says.

She stresses that the world’s broader political situation hasn’t fed into The Questions (there are songs about underpants). But as a political commentator, whose study of American right-wing conspiracy group QAnon was published in 2021, she is aware of a need to build bridges beyond polarisation and conspiracy theories. ‘The story of the play is, if those two stay with the antagonism that rises in the first act, that’s how they will die, with nothing but resentment. I think human beings can do better than that.’

So does the play’s oddest of couples find a happy ending? ‘It’s musical theatre!’ is all Badham will reveal. ‘We’re a bunch of musical theatre nerds, who are here to deliver the musical theatre experience. I think if you love musicals, you’ll not be disappointed.’

The Questions, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, Kaurna Country, Friday 26 July–Saturday 17 August; main picture: Jessica Lindsay.