Drama in black and white
Welcome to Broome
By Richard Mellick
Directed by Michael Gow
Company B and Black Swan Theatre
Belvoir Street Theatre, Surry Hills, Sydney
Until July 12
Review by Helen Jarvis
In 1997 Belvoir Street Theatre put on an ambitious play about black and white relations in Australia in the early days of white settlement. Black Mary, staged strikingly in the Eveleigh Street Carriage Workshop, featured hills and horses and guns a-blazing.
It was a great production, and received warm reviews and big houses, but was brought to a sudden end by a collapse of the seating stands. As a result, Belvoir Street's balance sheet for the year took a big nosedive, and most of Sydney's theatregoers missed out on a challenging and innovative play, with a strong performance by Margaret Harvey in the starring role of an Aboriginal woman in a liaison (both romantic and strategic) with a white bushranger.
Nearly a year later, Harvey returns to Sydney, to Belvoir Street's upstairs theatre, to take up the role of an Aboriginal woman, Chrissy, and her relationships with several white men, notably her husband Rob (Desmond Connellan) and a photographer, Jimmy (Andrew S. Gilbert), who is smitten with her, as well as with her Uncle Barney (Kelton Pell) and next-door neighbour Charlene (Sher Williams-Hood). This time Harvey plays in a decidedly contemporary setting as current Australian issues, attitudes and conflicts reverberate throughout.
Robert Kemp's set transports the audience immediately and completely to the tropics. Heavy mango trees and the recurrent screeching of bats seize your imagination. The big verandah and front yard form the setting for the whole play, with languid guitars and ballads punctuating each change of scene. Only the tropical smells are missing from Belvoir Street.
Chrissy and Rob are the central characters, and their house, an old pearling captain's home, is the Mecca to which the others are drawn. Each of the others, except for Charlene (a very funny and stroppy young woman who is an anchor for Chrissy), bring news and demands that confront and challenge Chrissy and Rob's household, which is already filled with the tensions of new parenthood and cross-race relations.
Rob has left his inner city Sydney life to go bush, to bridge the gap and to learn. He announces that he couldn't be happier than he is here in Broome with a great job, writing his own music and touring with Aboriginal bands, a wonderful wife and child. And yet something is not quite right.
So we see Chrissy and Rob struggle — over looking after the baby, over Jimmy's pressing presence and, above all, although it is not overtly stated until late in the play, over Chrissy's Aboriginality and her senses of obligation and responsibility, very different from Rob's.
A strong (for my taste, too strong) performance is provided by Geoff Kelso as Ferris, Rob's crazed mate, who has driven across the country in his EJ, only to leave it and lose it five kilometres from town.
Ferris and Charlene have to cope with Carl (Boris Radmilovich), who literally falls into the action while Rob and Chrissy are off at a funeral in Fitzroy Crossing. These two rise to face the responsibility of meeting Carl's needs — something Rob, on his return, cannot comprehend.
The issues are important, and handled sympathetically, and the setting and the music are lush, but somehow Welcome to Broome does not make the choice between being drama and vaudeville. Although the acting is excellent, the characters do not grow and the plots are overdrawn, relying for effect on their shock factor and on a second-hand retailing of offstage events.
In the end, despite my hopes for a strong new Australian play dealing with our own contemporary reality, Welcome to Broome left an impression more of a TV miniseries than of a dramatic whole.