But would anyone really want to be James Packer?

It's a question Tommy Murphy, for one, can't answer. But the acclaimed Australian playwright has a hunch that, like him, many Australians find the Packer dynasty fascinating.

"They're such a grotesque but also fascinating and complex set of men that loom large over more than a century across business and politics in Australia," he says.

"They warrant being examined many times, I think"

His latest play, Packer & Sons, set to open at Belvoir St Theatre in November, has been years in the writing and researching, although it wasn't until the theatre commissioned him directly that he began crafting the play in earnest.

Unpacking the Packers, as he likes to describe it, has been a revealing process.

Of course, volumes have already been written on the media and business moguls. The life and times of the bombastic media tycoon Kerry Packer is the stuff of folklore.

He gave us Cleo, tabloids, World Series Cricket, endless quotes about the foolishness of paying tax, and succinct reporting after returning from seven minutes on the other side of a near-death experience - "there's nothing there".

But what of the man who came before, Sir Frank, and the one who lives on forever in his shadow, James?

"It's a story about fathers and sons, and my interest here is examining the patriarchy, examining privilege in our society," Murphy says.

"I had had this idea some time ago, and have worked on it many years ago, but the timing wasn't right and the story was being told in different ways in television at the time.

"What I really wanted was a theatrical answer to it, and a character-based answer to it that the stage would relish. So it's a very different take on James and Kerry than we've seen elsewhere, and I think James' story hasn't really been dramatised yet, and James is a focus of this story."

The Queanbeyan-born-and-raised writer has been a luminary of Australian stage and screen-writing ever since his award-winning adaptation of Holding the Man, the 1995 gay romance memoir.

The play was made into a film in 2015, and had a run in London, alongside another of his plays, Strangers in Between.

His most recent play, Mark Colvin's Kidney, took more real-life figures, this time a desperately ill Australian radio journalist and Elle McPherson's former business manager.

Both figures were alive while Murphy was writing the work. It's a strange business, dramatising people who may well have an opinion on how you choose to go about it.

"I think you are always aware of the real people and ethically not to put anything on stage that is misleading," he says.

While Kerry Packer is no longer with us, James Packer is very much alive and kicking, and Murphy says he's keenly aware of the ethical considerations surrounding how he's depicted.

"James has very bravely spoken of - or announced - his mental health struggles, and I think he's been rightly praised for that courageous act," he says.

"He would have to be the highest ranking Australian businessman, or business person to have declared mental health battles, and I think that is a really generous and important and brave thing that he has done.

"So I am very aware of not contributing to any of those sensitive things.

"The story is a much earlier part of James' life. The play doesn't depict some of his recent travails. The story more or less ends around about the time of Kerry's death."

The fact remains today, though, that while James Packer is a manifestly troubled person, he is a man who walks through life believing everyone wants to be him.

"He has said in more than one interview that the vast majority of Australians would like to be James Packer, which I think is extraordinary as a claim," he says.

"And I don't know the answer, I don't know if it's true. I think maybe it is. I think a lot of us probably would like to be James Packer, I think we would probably guess that we might do things differently, that we might use the resources differently, that we might be able to bear the strains differently.

"But I reckon a lot of us would probably secretly like to have a red-hot go at it, and the thing we forget though is that to be James Packer is to have Kerry Packer as your father.

"I think Kerry never died, and that idea is really useful, theatrically."

The actors playing Kerry and James - John Howard and Josh McConville, respectively - both double as father and son, with Sir Frank becoming Kerry, and the young Kerry becoming James, creating a continuum throughout the play.

That's always been the idea, that there would be a theatrical passing of the mantle in the way that the roles are divided through the play, which opened up other theatrical gains in the story.

Through extensive research, Murphy has been able to whittle down the wide-reaching Packer mythology down to what is, at its core, a story of fathers and sons.

"There are so many interesting elements that might have been included, and a lot of them I gave them the opportunity. I wrote a lot of scenes that never ended up in the final play," he says.

"The focus has always been, though, on the story of fathers and sons, and this inheritance of a kind of crown, and the pressure and the way that that weighs heavily on the generation below it.

"So our story more or less begins with Sir Frank's fathering of Kerry's brother Clyde and Kerry, and the story of how Kerry went from the idiot son to outdoing them all. And then it moves on to what Kerry is like as a father.

"The most focused idea of the play, I hope, is about a cycle of brutal nurturing. So it really is looking at the patriarchy, it's really looking at how male privilege operates in our society, and telling that story via this powerful and prominent family.

"It's about a brutal nurture and an expectation of taking from others exists in our society."

Murphy, who went to school at St Edmunds College in Canberra, and later studied directing at NIDA, is an artist who rarely stops working.

Now that the play is entering into the intensive rehearsal stage, Murphy has already moved onto new projects, including some screenwriting for an upcoming Stan production, and a commission for the Sydney Theatre Company.

Although his working pace has always been constant, being immersed in work is a state of being he says is necessary at this time in his life.

Because Murphy is still deep in grief, after losing his partner of nearly 20 years, Dane Crawford, in April 2018.

"I'm still very much in shock and dealing with the trauma of Dane's unexpected death, because Dane died of a sleeping disorder and there was no warning about that," he says.

The couple had been planning a wedding when Crawford died.

Months before, the pair were photographed in the courtyard of their inner-city Sydney home just weeks before the result of the gay marriage vote was announced.

Murphy was urging readers to vote in the divisive ballot.

He and Crawford, as it stood, had just one document proving their commitment to each other - a mortgage agreement with a bank.

But Crawford died just six months later, before they were able to marry before their friends and family.

It's these same people, Murphy says, who are keeping him afloat as he negotiates his future without Crawford.

Soon, though, the courtyard will be lined with a distinctive new brick, called The Dane.

The custom-pressed brick has been named for Crawford, who was a building development manager working on a project in Sydney's city centre.

"It's a beautiful tribute to him, something so solemn, lasting and elegant and beautiful," Murphy says.

"I guess what I love about it is that it seems to represent Dane's practicality but also his love of great design. It's an unusual thing to have a brick named after you."

In the meantime, Murphy is immersing himself in work.

"I have found that work and the support of my artistic community has been one of the ways that I am managing to recover," he says.

"I have a residency at Currency Press, a theatre publisher, for example, which has been my anchor through this time, and I've been lucky enough to be engaged in some steady television work as well as a couple of play commissions.

"I think deliberately and fortunately, I've needed to be productive, and that has helped me a great deal."

Writing has always been his main outlet, especially when he's able to bring characters to life on stage or screen.

"There's something about the vernacular of characters that I enjoy, there's something about the need in dramatic writing of not displaying the writer too much," he says.

"It's not that we're hiding, but it's the character's voice, the character's impulses that you believe you're watching in drama, and the times when you can see the playwright or screenwriter at work are generally the clumsy bits.

"That in itself makes it a very different task to other literary forms."