Queensland Theatre Company. Adelaide Festival. Her Majesty's Theatre. 10 Mar 2015
The theatre is smokey. Flames lick out of a 44-gallon drum on the stage. And old man sits nearby against a backdrop of massive blackboards covered in chalky scrawlings.
The atmosphere is established for the audience shuffling into place in Her Majesty's.
This is a big night for Adelaide theatre. This is the 2015 Festival's big theatre production. It has been a thin theatre program this festival and audiences are hungry and expectant.
Black Diggers is a big show from Queensland Theatre Company, written by Tom Wright and directed by Wesley Enoch. It has already had seasons interstate and it has been localised for Adelaide, with references to local names and places.
It is a national story, after all; a broad-strokes account of Aboriginal Australians who served in World War I.
It is a tale of hope, innocence, friendship, loyalty, and racism.
Young Aboriginal men volunteered for service against a cultural tide which had denied them recognition. Black Diggers condenses the accounts of many of those men into a series of vignettes layered swiftly and neatly one upon another. The all-male cast is huge and it is as beautifully co-ordinated as an elite army unit. There are swift costume changes and tableaux. There are highly-disciplined representations of unruliness - for these men out in the charnel house of WWI, on the death fields of Gallipoli, Amiens, Passchendaele, and Messines, were also rough kids from the bush. There, so far from home and fighting for a political cause few really understood, they discovered the comfort of mateship. They were equals in combat, in sharing the hell of war. Skin colour was not an issue.
There were instances of intolerance, however, and the characters of Black Diggers chose various ways to respond. One chap, in punching out a racist soldier from another troop, explained to his mates that his violent retaliation had been at the accusation of not washing, not at the racial slur.
Hence were things different for Aboriginal soldiers. They were part of a family of Aussies bonded by deed. They gained a sense of national belonging and a new sense of country.
The production has some marvellous moments, none a more poignant portrait of war than the row of soldiers sitting in their trench singing their songs and killing time for day after day, their boredom occasionally disturbed by sudden bursts of utter horror and panic. The boys reflect on the small areas of gained or lost territory these slow strategies were achieving. And years rolled by.
The endless suffering breaks the spirit of some. One lad reveals that he really should not be there. He is only 15.
Places of combat are painted large in white on the great blackboards and, as the play draws to a close, they are whitewashed for the names of dead Aboriginal soldiers to take their place in black upon them.
Throughout, there is a soundscape which colours the audience's imagination with the details of time and place - from the birds of the bush through to the shocking blasts of shellfire. It is a brilliant and exemplary soundscape, impeccably balanced against the action onstage.
The soldiers come home in various states and to various receptions. Racism is not dead, but then again, from some quarters, belonging and equality has been earned and recognised. Some returned men will cope with the future and some will never be the same. Ever was it thus.
But for some Aboriginal men there were some dire injustices, not the least of them the deeply ironic loss of their lands in the solider-settler land giveaways.
Black Diggers covers this huge subject with its large scale - the large stage made to seem cavernous with just platforms and the blackboard background. It is a well devised and designed production. The cast is diverse and likeable. They play myriad characters, from recruiters and officers to an outback mum. When they sing, they do so with the ragged enthusiasm of a batch of untrained boys.
The play is finely written. There are some lovely turns of phrase. However, it is overwritten. There are some soliloquies which drift into didacticism. And the play suffers from afterthoughts, as if it does not know quite when to end.
Ah, but what a brilliant bugler.
Samela Harris
When: 10 to 14 Mar
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
