21 Hearts: Vivian Bullwinkel and
the Nurses of the Vyner Brooke by Jenny Davis.
Directed by Stuart Halusz.
Producers Rebecca Davis and Michelle Fornasier. Associate Producer Ali Welburn.
Presenting Partners The Australian Government’s Department of Veterans Affairs.
Set design by Stuart Halusz. Visual Design by Gneiss Design. Sound designer and
programmer Ben Collins. Lighting design by Rowan van Blomestein. Costume design
by Ingrid Zursulo. Movement director Rachael Bott. Theme song composer and
musical director Craig Skelton. Theme song vocalists Lisa Harper-Brown and
Saskia Haluszkiewicz. Theme song musicians Australian Baroque. Stage manager
Craig Williams. Assistant stage manager Aaron Stirk. Publicity and marketing
Limelight consulting.Photographs by Stewart Thorpe Photography.
Cast: Rebecca Davis, Caitlin
Beresford-Ord. Michelle Fornasier. Alex Jones Helen Searle and Alison van
Reeken.
The Australian War Memorial
Theatre. July 24 – August 3 2025. Bookings www.awm.gov.au
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
 |
| The cast of 21 Hearts: Vivian Bullwinkel and the Nurses of the Vyner Brooke |
On February 16th 1942,
22 nurses of the Australian Army Nursing Service turned their backs on the
rifles and the bayonets of the Japanese soldiers and walked, chins up into the
lapping seawater of Radji Beach on Indonesia’s Bangka Island. The gunshots rang
out behind them and 21 of the nurses fell dead into the crimson water. One
alone miraculously survived by playing dead after being shot. In playwright Jenny
Davis’s profoundly moving tale of courage and survival, love and hope in the
face of the horrific atrocities of war, Davis has created a riveting account of
the experiences of the surviving nurse, Vivian Bullwinkel (Rebecca Davis).
 |
| Rebecca Davis as Vivian Bullwinkel |
Under Theatre 180’s Artistic Director Stuart Halusz 21 Hearts: Vivian Bullwinkel and the Nurses of the Vyner Brooke assumes epic stature. Davis’s play is a portrait of aspiration and dedication, of dreams hoped for and dreams destroyed and man’s inhumanity to man. Vivian Bullwinkel’s story is a tale of survival against the odds, of sacrifice in the face of adversity, of love and compassion and ultimately of determination to honour and preserve the memory of the twenty one nurses murdered on the beach and others who died while in the Japanese POW camps before the liberation on August 25th 1945.
Halusz’s excellent cast bring to life with powerful conviction the ill-fated nurses of Bangka Island, and apart from Davis in the title role, the other actors double up as Bullwinkel’s mother, the nurses in the POW camp, a young British girl whom Bullwinkel befriends and her grandmother. They enact the songs sung by the choral members of the prisoners’ choir and voiceovers provide the characters of allied soldiers. The small touring cast of six take the audience along on a rollercoaster of emotions.
After the opening scene with Bullwinkel on the beach in 1993 to lay a memorial to her murdered companions, Davis’s play sweeps us along through moments of fun and laughter in Singapore before the fall to the Japanese, to the fear and uncertainty of impending invasion, and the sinking of the S.S.Vyner Brooke to the capture and brutal murder of the nurses , Bullwinkel’s escape in the company of a wounded soldier and arrival at the camp. The drama then focuses on life in the camp, the cruelty of the captors and the struggle to survive the horrors and deprivation of imprisonment.
Davis’s artful, skillfully researched storytelling is a tectonic plate of different emotions. There are moments of humour, the healing power of song, the collapse of human dignity, the crippling paralysis of fear, the powerful force of caneraderie and the tearful catharsis of empathy. For two hours Theatre180s excellent cast of actors and creatives relive the story that needs to be told. “Why am I here?” Bullwinkel cries. That is why, lest we forget. That is why she must testify at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. It is why the girls from a local college needed to come to the performance today.
Lest we forget. Jenny Davis’s 21 Hearts and Theatre 180’s outstanding production claim full merit as the inaugural production in the Australian War Memorial’s impressive new theatre. The Memorial is not merely a custodian of military history. It is an account of the experience of real lives, of good and evil in the human condition and of the noble virtues of courage, love, sacrifice and compassion. That is why a play as remarkable as 21 Hearts: Vivian Bullwinkel and the Nurses of the Vyner Brooke performed by the finest of actors and staged with imagination and purpose warrants the full house that it played to with rapturous acclaim today. The Australian War Memorial is to be commended on staging 21 Heart: Vivian Bullwinkel and the Nurses of the Viyner Brooke. It will stay with you long after you leave the theatre.
