Even without costumes, a stage, or the entire cast, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s tale of Eighteenth Century convicts staging a play in an Australian penal colony comes to life. The rehearsal space of Wadham’s “theatre” has more vibes of a school gym than a place of performance, but for a few minutes it becomes a space owned entirely by the actors. I’m sitting in on a scene near the end of the play, when rising tensions come to a head between Officer Ralph and convict Wisehammer in their fight over Mary Brenham.
It becomes evident almost instantly how sympathetic each actor is towards their character. Dom Pollard, playing Ralph, vocalised what was already evident, “the lines are not just lines, but an overriding subtext”.
The actors have clearly not just memorised the words, but allowed them to filter into their consciousness to form a character that can live outside the pages of a play script. Each run-through of the scene uses a different approach to the characters, and it is invigorating to see theatre’s versatility of play being used to its fullest extent. Furthermore, it is refreshing to see actors who thoroughly understand their characters as people and not just textual constructs.
Playfulness aside, a conversation with director Fay Lomas on why she chose the text reveals a deeper poignancy and cultural relevance. Despite being written thirty years ago, for her the text reflects cultural and social issues that are present in our own society.
“For both the characters in the play and prisoners in our own prison system, art and literature are important means of expression. If such materials are taken away, as is being questioned in our own society now, people become devoid of any creative outlet and means of expression. They become more isolated than they already are.”
It also becomes clear how ambitious, and how successfully so, Lomas’ production is. For her, the largest challenge is the sheer amount of action in the play. Actors are not only playing characters, but characters playing other characters on a stage where “people are sets; sets are people”.
Everything becomes either a prop or an actor. Set plans reveal how the unusually laid out blocks on the stage become a representational hierarchy of the colony’s social divisions, held together by decorative ropes, and show their unified isolation at the edge of the British Empire. The audience themselves are laid in a huddled fashion around the corner, in a sense temporarily becoming the speechless other members of the colony, gazing at the spectacle of convicts in dirty clothing and finely attired guards.
Although I only saw a snippet of the play, I can’t wait to go back to the Keble O’Reilly to see more. From the conversations that I had, I gained a sense of deep investment and involvement in the project of both cast and crew, nurturing the text into a living, breathing colony on stage that thrives off the attention of an audience. Don’t let this creative child starve — go and see it.
