The Chosen Vessel. By Dylan Van Den Berg after the short story by Barbara Baynton
Director Abbie-Lee Lewis. Set designer Angie Matsinos. Costume designer Leah Ridley, Lighting designer Nathan Sciberras. Sound designer Kyle Sheedy. Stage Manager Zsuzsi Soboslay. Actors Craig Alexander. LailaThaker. The Street. World premiere August 9. Season August 9 – 24 Street Two. Bookings 62471223 or foh@thestreet.org.au
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Craig Alexander as The Husband. Laila Thaker as The Woman |
‘If the dead can see why can’t you?” It is the haunting admonition of the ghost of an aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander woman. The final line of Dylan Van Den Berg’s adaptation of Barbara Baynton’s nineteenth century short story The Chosen Vessel is unsettling, recriminatory and ultimately a vessel for truthtelling. Van Den Berg has established himself as a Palawa playwright of enormous significance with previous award winning works, the autobiographical Milk and White fella Yella Tree and Way back When. Van Den Berg’s adaptation not only attests to the power of his voice for First Nations Australians but his place as one of the most significant Australian playwrights to emerge in the twenty-first century.
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| Laila Thaker as The Woman in The Chosen Vessel |
The Chosen Vessel presents a different approach to Van Den Berg’s previous works. He has chosen to adapt Baynton’s short story of a white woman, isolated in a remote bush setting and threatened by white males. In Van Den Berg’s transformation, Torres Strait Islander and Indian actor Laila Thaker plays a Blak mother, living alone with her baby in an isolated home in the Australian bush. White actor Craig Alexander plays multiple archetypal roles, a swagman. a young childhood friend, a brutal husband, a horseman and a priest.
Van Den Berg has stated that he has, as a First Nations playwright commandeered the Gothic genre. Aboriginal Gothic genre varies in certain respects from traditional Gothic as we may perceive it in the Western theatre tradition. In Abbie-Lee Lewis’s evocative production, Gothic conventions are superbly realized in Angie Matsinos’s atmospheric set design in the intimate Street Two setting, Nathan Sciberris’s shadowy lighting design and Kyle Sheedy’s dramatic sound design. The production plumbs the psyche. Dark imaginings, fear and terror, the chilling threat of danger and the brutal violence of anger are all aspects of the human experience in The Chosen Vessel.. However, Van Den Berg’s introduction of the Ghost from the very outset reminds us of connection to the spirit and ancestry. Emerging from the dark, the Ghost, also played by Laila Thaker, breathes life into landscape with her description of Country, once unspoiled by the invasion and destruction of colonial occupation. Country is character in Van Den Berg’s adaptation. The language of the Ghost is the poetry of beauty, comfort and silence. In contrast the voice of the white characters becomes the language of violence and destruction of Country. The Chosen Vessel is a story of wrongs done and never righted, of Country lost and not regained. It is set at the time of Baynton’s short story and the turn of the 20th Century. And yet in Van Den Berg’s poetic prose of protestation we are compelled to see the plight of the displaced, the deprivation of the oppressed, the theft of Country and the injustice of colonial invasion. Baynton dared to reveal the injustice faced by the white woman of her time. Van Den Berg reveals the injustice faced still by the indigenous people of his time. It is in the re-imagining of this story that Van Den Berg’s transformative power as a storyteller will provide hope for a retelling of his people’s reality.
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| Craig Alexander as The Traveller in The Chosen Vessel |
Van Den Berg could not wish for two more accomplished actors to play the multiple roles in The Chosen Vessel. As the Ghost, Thaker imbues the dynamic art of storytelling with the wisdom of her people and forthrightness of generations of experience. Her transition to the woman and mother of the infant child, isolated and vulnerable is heartrending, her fear and terror at her violent abuse shocking and visceral. She is Everywoman and one woman. Alexander’s agile transition from one role to another endows each character with a distinctive persona from the ominous looming shadow behind the screen to the clumsy slapstick of the young boy, the vicious brutality of the swagman, the vision sighting horseman and the sanctimonious priest. In twelve short scenes and at little more than slightly over an hour of gripping theatre, Thaker and Alexander weave a tale of truth telling that reveals a damaged history. Unlike some western gothic literature the Aboriginal Gothic genre promises a possibility of transformation and change..
The Street World Premiere of Van Den Berg’s The Chosen Vessel is a triumph of collaboration. This production may remind us of the wrongs of the past, but Van Den Berg’s skill as a playwright and the brilliant support of cast and creatives reinforces the Ghost’s opening lines;
“The truth’s like a whisper , aint it? You heard ‘em before”?
You’d think our tales would cure deafness, wouldn’t ya ?
But here I am –
Dragged back to tell ya –“
The Chosen Vessel is a lesson for our time. It is a powerful story you need to hear and see.
Photos by Nathan Smith Photography
