STOLEN
Sydney Theatre Company
Wharf 1 Theatre, May 11
Until July 6
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
Little children suffer terror with minimal provocation. Dreams, sounds and shadows on the wall will do it, let alone hospitals, war and abduction. Alongside tidal waves of grief, families ripped asunder, all sense of home and belonging annulled and lives devastated beyond salvage, the saga of the Stolen Generations is also one of sheer terror. Ian Michael’s Sydney Theatre Company production of Jane Harrison’s pivotal 1998 play has the power to trigger this sensation.
We’ve grown used to terror – whether in film, fiction or plays – being allied to Gothic horror, but what Michael gives us is more deeply affecting. It has no thrill factor. Renee Mulder’s set is primarily defined by a giant bed and filing cabinet.
Megan Wilding, who audiences are used to seeing in comedic roles, is the standout. Credit: Daniel Boud
Where Harrison’s text called for “five old iron institutional beds”, Mulder gives us just this one, seen from a toddler’s perspective: monstrous, formidable and as cosy as scaffolding. The hulking filing cabinet’s drawers, meanwhile, which lock away forever the secrets of birth, name, family and home, open to become a stairway to nowhere: the destination of too many First Nations lives under this institutionalised “kindness”.
James Brown’s underscore amplifies the impact: sparse, whispered sounds that never venture near the borders of melodrama. Then there are the gigantic, looming, cheerless puppets used to represent the whites who take in the children, with their mouths hissing platitudes to bolster their indefatigable self-righteousness.
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The inspiration for this disquieting theatrical ingenuity is all there in Harrison’s vastly imaginative text, with its chronological leaps between the characters’ childhood and adult lives, which, as well as showing cause and effect, magnify the pervading bewilderment and alienation we share.
Her “case studies” are brilliantly vivid. There’s Jimmy (Jarron Andy), who has a penchant for embroiling himself in trouble and is sceptical of his one chance to be reunited with his mother. Mischief becomes trouble with the law, and the outcome is a statistical abomination.
Sandy (Mathew Cooper) is the wise one; the one with a sense of connection if only he can find the right place with which to connect. Ruby (Kartanya Maynard) is brought to the children’s home far too young and subsequently discovers worse inhumanity too young as well.