A lyrical homage to the spirit of the Australian bush, Sydney Theatre Company’s The Shiralee is set on the highways and byways of 1950s Australia, with brief visits to the urban squalor of Kings Cross.
Adapted by Kate Mulvany and directed by Jessica Arthur, there is something Shakespearean about the play’s shifting between the cruel city and the pastoral expanses of the bush.
Mulvany’s adaptation of the classic 1955 D’Arcy Niland novel tries to refocus the story through the perspective of Buster (Ziggy Resnick), the young girl asked to navigate an adult’s world of violence and exile.
When her father, a hardened swagman named Mac Macauley (a mesmerising Josh McConville), rescues her from neglect in Kings Cross, they are persued by police and hit the road to embrace the gruelling swag-man’s life.
Buster proves herself a resilient force who defies the harshness of their travails and helps her father confront his own childhood trauma.
Going bush
The tranquillity of the bush plays an ever-present soothing role, despite the turmoils of the swaggies beneath her boughs. Jeremy Allen’s set design is clean, highly textured and full of colour.
Two impressive towering gum trees are wheeled slowly about on casters to effect a range of bush-land tracks and camps. Trent Suidgeest’s superb lighting bathes the scrub in golden hues or morning glows. Jessica Dunn’s sound design ensures the atmospherics are subtle and engrossing.
All this is a testament to Mulvany’s playwriting, who ensures each scene builds and propels the characters forward. The scenes roll together at a cracking pace, yet without feeling rushed. Mulvany also inserts bush poems throughout the play in interesting ways, creating a lyrical alchemy.
The tranquillity of the bush plays an ever-present soothing role.
Prudence Upton/Sydney Theatre Company
Outstanding performances
Mac’s journey adroitly models the hero’s journey, popularised by comparative mythology academic Joseph Campbell. Each of the characters, too, accord readily with the archetypes Campbell spelt out, including the hero (Mac), herald (Marge) and mentor (Buster and Lily).
In this hero’s role, the surly and brusque Mac Macauley is the story’s true protagonist.
Built like a brick outhouse, McConville fully embodies the gruff rover, unfazed by bare-knuckle boxing matches to win prize money. As D’Arcy’s novel affirms, “He was a man of thirty-five, built like a cenotaph, squat and solid”.
McConville fully embodies the gruff rover, unfazed by bare-knuckle boxing matches.
Prudence Upton/Sydney Theatre Company
McConville moves like an Australian Stanley Kowalski, drifting through the outback in search of labour.
Rural women are drawn to his charms. Lily (Catherine Văn-Davies) is the belle of Grafton, in love with Mac but understanding his roving life. Văn-Davies also doubles as Minny, the salacious pie-shop owner in another town who gets Mac to help her “shift some sacks of sugar” out the back.
Resnick is fiercely vivacious as the child Buster,