Elsewhere
Elsewhere
✭✭✭✭✭
by Katherine Thomson, directed by Marion Potts
HotHouse Theatre Company, Stables Theatre, Sydney
July 16-August 9, 2003
"Wonderlands", an excellent new play by Katherine Thomson, deals with native title rights or what Canadians would call aboriginal land claims. The HotHouse Theatre Company of Albury, Victoria, gives the play a vibrant, committed production that makes for an intriguing, thought-provoking experience.
The story is set in rural Queensland both in the present and in 1931. In the present Lon (Roger Oakley) and his wife Cathy (Annie Byron) are looking forward to the upcoming wedding of their farmhand Tom (Scott Johnson) with their daughter Tessie. The only problem is that Tessie has left home and won't tell anyone where she is. She sends out increasing cryptic messages leading her parents to fear she has gone mad. Lon and Cathy try various ruses to prevent Tom from knowing, but this can succeed only so long. Meanwhile, the community including Lon is hit with a claim from the Yirralong people represented by Edie (Pauline Whyman). Lon's dream of passing on the farm to Tom is thus compromised on two fronts.
Interspersed with this are scenes set in 1931 concerning Lon's great-aunt Alice (Gwyneth Price) and her Aboriginal station master Jim (Isaac Drandich). Alice is writing a book to relate to future times what rural life is like. She is particularly concerned to document that at least on this station the Aboriginals were never exploited. Indeed, she even plans to run the station with Jim as equals and to leave it to him and his family in her will. Her fall from a horse and the effects of her head injury threaten to compromise her dream.
The twin themes of the play are division and connection. Thomson allows the two strands of the plot to run parallel for much of the action. But as the play progresses the past and present, Alice's story and Lon's, the lives of the Aboriginals and pastoralists, come together in surprising ways. The notion of separate peoples and times is replaced with a profound sense of the interconnectedness of things.
The staging takes advantage of the normal seating arrangement at the Stables Theatre that divides the audience into two groups on two sides of a triangular acting space. In Ralph Myers' simple but very effective design, the space up to the seats is covered with a red, clayey earth but divided into an S-shape by a translucent curtain cover with gum leaves caught as if blown in a strong wind. By the end we see how characters past and present, white and black, have shared this same earth and the curtain of separation which, drawn away to join the audience in watching the play, remains open literally and figuratively.
Director Marion Potts has drawn finely detailed performances from the whole cast who bring out the complexities of Thomson's characters. Oakley effortlessly captures the essence of a man whose humour and racially insensitive bluster hide a deep insecurity. He is perfectly countered by the calm dignity of Whyman's Edie. Byron is richly comic as Cathy and Price ardent as the idealistic Alice. Johnson and Drandich make the most of characters who tend to seem rather too naive.
Thomson deals with an important topic in a far subtler way than most Canadian attempts have done by starting from the point of view that the subject is painful and complex. Indeed, she suggests that there is hope for reconciliation through a mutual recognition of pain and loss. Given the audience response that moved beyond enthusiastic applause to cheers, this is a play and a production fully deserving of the wider tour HotHouse plans to give it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in the TheatreWorld (UK) 2003-08-28.
Photo: Gwyneth Price and Isaac Dandrich. ©2003 Jules Boag.
2003-08-28
Sydney, AUS: Wonderlands