Theatre: John Gavin

Written and directed by Nick Candy

With Dawn Pascoe, Steven Finnigan and Nick Candy

Blue Room Theatre

17 April – 5 May

Nick Candy, Steven Finnegan and
Dawn Pascoe (pic Matt Scurfield)

There’s the tale and there’s its telling.

John Gavin was just 15 when, in April 1844, he became the first European executed in the fledgling Swan River Colony. His short life was Dickensian: when he was only 11, he was transported with 28 other boys, “Parkhurst Apprentices”, to Western Australia to serve a 10-year sentence for, we gather, some minor artful dodgering. He’d been here four months when, in February 1844, he confessed to the brutal murder of George Pollard, a son of the Pinjarra family to whom he had been indentured. He was tried on April 3 that year and, two days later (Good Friday intervened), hanged at the Roundhouse in Fremantle.

In an act of gruesome kindness, the sheriff had weights tied to Gavin’s skinny legs so the lad’s death pangs would be mercifully brief. His body was secretly buried in a shallow grave in sandhills to the south of the Roundhouse.

Nick Candy’s script recounts Gavin’s wretched story with few embellishments and scant detail. He implies, but doesn’t effectively substantiate, doubt about the boy’s guilt, but this seemed to me more for effect than purpose.

Theatre: The Enchanters

By John Aitken

Directed and designed by John Senczuk

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by James Luscombe

Featuring Richard Mellick, Nick Maclaine, Ethan Tomas, Ian Toyne, David McLeod, Sam Tye, Edgar Metcalfe, Cody Fern, Andrew Hale, John Pratt, Nick Candy and John Aitken.  

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

June 1 – 4, 2011

Veteran WA playwright John Aitken has seized the opportunity presented by the opening of the State Theatre Centre to imagine the watershed year of William Shakespeare’s career in The Enchanters, and he and director/designer John Senczuk have fashioned a likeable, albeit patchy, entertainment from it.

It’s a ripping yarn, with cloak-and-daggery at court and lawyers, swords and money in the streets. Aitken has drawn assiduously from his sources, most notably, I suspect, James Shapiro’s terrific 1599, to tell the story of Richard Burbage’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, and the opening of their new theatre, the Globe.

Aitken can’t resist airing some of the more contentious speculations about Shakespeare, his sexuality and religious and political loyalties among them. Personally, I’m averse to the idea of Shakespeare as a high-class rent boy for the Earl of Southhampton and some of the other detritus of Shakespeariana given credence by the play, but you can be the judge of that.

Link here  to the complete review in The West Australian