Of course it’s legitimate to create an epic story about white Australia. This doesn’t solve the fundamental problem in the text: rather, it highlights it. The casting also includes three Indigenous actors. The “Black Man” narrator has been replaced by two Storytellers (Ebony McGuire and Ian Michael) and they’ve introduced passages spoken in the Noongar language.
The original script has been rewritten to emphasise the Indigenous stories through the introduction of more narrated text. The creators of this production are clearly conscious of this problem. The danger is that Aboriginal voices exist merely as incidental emotional motivations for the white (male) characters. The house is haunted by the shadows of Indigenous Australia – it was formerly a mission for kidnapped Aboriginal girls, one of whom, like her captor, died in the library, a room that no one wants to enter. It’s a story that attempts to grapple, to some degree at least, with the heritage of colonisation. Pickles and Lambs: (L_R) Guy Simon, Benjamin Oakes, Alison Whyte, Ebony McGuire, Arielle Gray, Mikayla Merks. Two families, the sensual, irresponsible Pickles and the God-fearing, prudent Lambs, flee different misfortunes – Sam Pickles has lost his fingers in a winch, while the Lambs’ favourite son Fish almost drowns, surviving with a brain injury – and end up sharing a huge house over two decades. It’s impossible not to read the ramshackle home in Cloud Street, this “continent of a house”, as a synecdoche for Australia itself. I wonder what this wash of feeling is drowning out, what it’s making invisible. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against sentiment, but its presence often makes me wary. There’s something too about the kinds of sentiment Winton’s stories generate. Perhaps it’s simply because I’m a woman: even when women and girls are present in Winton’s stories, they always seem to me to be primarily functions of male subjectivity. That might be because even though I came here as a child, I still don’t really feel Australian. This is partly due to the show’s episodic nature, and partly the story itself – I always feel that I’m placed outside the us-ness of Winton’s narratives. It was magical and breathtaking.ĭespite these moments, I found myself largely untouched. During the key scene of this play – when Fish and Quick, crouched in a dinghy, enter a spiritual space that is both water and sky – I realised halfway through, with a start, that the entire stage floor was covered ankle-deep with water, a black, depthless expanse throwing light ripples around the stage. Over the five hours, there are some beautiful moments. It’s undeniable that Lutton orchestrates an impressive show. Guy Simon as Quick and Benjamin Oakes as Fish.
0 kommentar(er)
