Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, October 10
6/10
A deep sense of mythology surrounds the reader in D’Arcy Niland’s 1955 novel, The Shiralee. It’s as if the very landscape of mid-20th-century Australia is misanthropic, while those inhabiting it can be as deadly as brown snakes. In adapting the novel, playwright Kate Mulvany and director Jessica Arthur (for Sydney Theatre Company) have been aware of this quality, but they’ve only partially succeeded in transmitting it through their production. Too often this feels like a musical minus the songs: as gooey as a box of chocolates in the sun when attempting warmth of heart, and a little lame and stagy when shooting for menace.
Niland’s novel tells of Mac, an itinerant jack-of-all-trades, who arrives back in Sydney to find his wife in bed with another bloke. Mac sorts out the bloke with his fists, and his wife by taking their daughter, Buster, and hitting the road. It’s a tale of a little girl adoring her remote, belligerent father, and gradually wearing away his armoured outer layer, almost as slowly as water acts on stone.
Given the limitations of child actors, Buster is now nine rather than four, which shifts the dynamic considerably, as a four-year-old is obviously more helpless and dependent. Mulvaney uses this shift to craft a more knowing, perceptive and wily Buster, and then Arthur has cast the notable Ziggy Resnick in the role. Although over a dozen years older than Buster, Resnick locates the truth of the bashfulness, eagerness, playfulness, bewilderment, humour, earnestness and staunch morality.
Mulvaney also makes Buster more influential and more evenly matched in size of role with Mac, played by Josh McConville. McConville is convincing as the bluff, taciturn man who solves money problems with his sweat, and people problems with his fists. Tempered like steel in a forge, he is loath to let this slip of a girl, this shiralee (or burden) change his pugnacious, self-absorbed life.
Niland peoples his novel with vivid incidental characters, and a further six actors assume multiple roles, including Mulvaney, herself, playing Marge, Buster’s mother, whom she makes more rounded and sympathetic now she’s not just being seen through Mac’s eyes.
Paul Capsis is ideal as the superbly eccentric Desmond, a cycling swaggie and published bush poet. He (as do most of the minor characters) offers flickers of illumination to the protagonists, especially Buster, who is photographic paper in this regard compared with Mac’s carbon paper. Stephen Anderson, Lucia Mastrantone, Aaron Pedersen and Catherine Van-Davies complete the cast.
Unlike the book, the story is told chronologically, which perhaps partly undermines that mythic quality: time is now linear rather than looped. But Jeremy Allen’s set bolsters the mythology, highlighting the Drama Theatre’s widescreen stage, while Jessica Dunn’s music amplifies the sense of space, foreboding and starry-skied wonderment. Alas, they can’t help the fact that when the play swerves back towards naturalism, it should be woven from grittier fabric.
Until November 29.
https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/sydney-theatre-company/2025-season/shiralee