by Chris Isaacs and
Ian Michael
Black Swan State
Theatre Company
Directed by Clare
Watson and Ian Wilkes
Designed by Zoe
Atkinson
Composer and sound
designer Dr Clint Bracknell
Lighting designer Lucy
Birkenshaw
Performed by Shakira
Clanton, Isaac Diamond, Ben Mortley, Benjamin and Jacob Narkle (alternating),
Sophie Quin, Maitland Schnaars, Alison van Reeken and Elise Wilson
Heath Ledger
Theatre until August 1, 2021
 |
Maitland Schnaars
|
Even
without its qualities (there are many), Chris Isaac and Ian Michael’s York is among
the most significant works to come to the State Theatre Centre stage over its
first decade. It’s the
product of a web of training and experience, inspiration and experience,
knowledge and sheer talent from sources as wide as WAAPA, the Yirra Yaakin
Theatre Company and the Blue Room, The Last Great Hunt and others of our
independent companies, the WA Youth Theatre Company and Black Swan – both at
its genesis and in its current status as the State Theatre Company.
What
Michael and Isaacs have done is take a location (the barely-disguised old York
hospital and its site) and peeled back its history from the present to the
early days of European settlement.
That, of
course, is only a wafer-thin slice of this place; before then, stretching back
tens of thousands of years, it was the country of the Ballardong Noongar people,
a fertile, fecund land of bush and river flats, providing everything its
inhabitants needed to live full, spiritually-charged and welcoming lives.
It
underpins the hard story Isaacs and Michael tell – it’s that lost life that is
the unquiet ghost that drifts through the trees like smoke from spectral
campfires and rattles the windows of the old hospital with grievous memories.
The other unspoken but crystal-clear message of York is that, while the
near-destruction of the lives and culture of this continent’s First Peoples is
the stark and terrible result of often brutal and inhumane European
colonization, no-one has been left undamaged by it. The colonial European world
that was built here carries a persistent, angry flaw at its heart, an original
sin that even 250 years hasn’t erased, making victims of its own as well as the
“other”.
In York,
we meet those victims, a slaughtered settler family and the Ballardong men
falsely accused of their murder, a desperate family hoping to save the life of
their boy and the stern matron who tries to help them, a young man driven mad
by Europe’s wars and a committed Aboriginal lawyer driven crazy by an indifferent
legal system stacked against her clients in the present day.
Before we
meet them, though, we’re taken on a wild, zany ride through the old building,
so out of character with both our expectations and what is to follow that it
defies conventional theatrical logic.
It’s a
classic horror-com, complete with things that go bang in the night, shrieking
apparitions, Rooms That Must Not Be Entered, a ditzy neighbor who’ll only come
to the house armed with a cricket bat, and then only during daylight hours.
In the
middle of this mayhem comes a little scout troupe (Isaac Diamond, Ben Mortley,
Jacob Narkle, Sophie Quinn and Elise Wilson) and their two Akelas (Jo Morris
and Shakira Clanton) on a Foundation Day long weekend camp in 1985.
Young
Michael (Mortley) relates a lurid story of a cannibal ghost told him by the old
building’s janitor (Maitland Schnaars); a young Indigenous boy, Lewis (Narkle),
conjurs up ghoulish monsters from his tradition. Blood streams from bannisters,
ghostly hands encircle young necks – it’s
the whole shebang.
The
whole affair is gleefully orchestrated by its directors Clare Watson and Ian
Wilkes, the designer Zoe Atkinson (that set of hers is ALIVE!) and lighting and
sound designers Lucy Birkenshaw and Clint Bracknell.
(I
should say the fun and games were greatly enlivened by a hyperactive first
night audience who found the whole thing genuinely hilarious and terrifying.
Bless them – I wish every opening night mob were half as entertaining!).
There
are intimations of the real-life horrors to come in the first act, although
they might have been more direct and extended in the interests of the balance
of the enterprise.
The mood
of the first act is swept away after interval by the abject figure of a young
man (Diamond), recently returned from the horrors of the WWI trenches, rocking
in a chair, his mind in torment, his waking nightmares too hard for the matron,
Roslyn Bell (Alison van Reeken) to relieve.
Another
nightmare comes to the hospital – a young boy gravely ill with influenza (Narkle)
from one of Chief Protector of Aborigines Neville’s Native Reserves, and his
distraught parents (Clanton and Schnaars).
Duty and
humanity overcome the matron’s fear and misgivings, and she treats the young
boy despite the regulations forbidding it; her transgression is discovered, the
price she pays is swift and brutal.
Finally,
in 1839, a half-century before the hospital was built, a little family, Elijah
and Sarah Cook and their infant daughter settled the same land. Sarah struck up
friendships with the local Ballardong people, giving them water from the well, greeting
their families as they passed through.
When the
Cook’s homestead was razed to the ground, the bodies of Sarah and her child in
the ruins, Inspector of Native Police Drummond fixed, by mere rumour and
supposition (and despite any evidence to the contrary), on the guilt of two
Noongar men, Doodjeep and Barrabong, who were hunted down, found guilty in a
show trial in 1840 and hung in chains at the site of the crime as a “severe
example” to the local Indigenous population.
This
terrible story is told by the cast as a chorus front of stage, before York ends
as it begins, with a married couple (Clanton and van Reeken) settling into the
old building they plan to make their home.
And its
past is theirs, to haunt them too.
There’s
no denying the power of these stories, each based on fact, even if the
structure of the play, and the changing moods and performance styles used to
tell them can sit uncomfortably at times.
The
younger actors, Jacob Narkle (he alternates with his brother Benjamin), Quinn,
Wilson (whose intensity is weapons grade) and Isaacs are assured and
convincing, and Mortley and Clanton bring poise and experience to their various
roles. It’s a delight to see van Reeken and Morris, two of our very finest
actors, working together in extended scenes.
Above
all, York is a major career achievement for Maitland Schnaars. His presence,
and his great, sombre, soul, fills the theatre when he conjures up the wronged
ghosts of generations, while his comic touch in a couple of smaller roles is
exquisite.
Schnaars
has become an exceptional actor, and it’s a privilege to see him in a work that
clearly means a great deal to him
As it
should to us.
