Destination Home written and performed by Camilla Blunden, Liliana Bogatko, Raoul Craemer and Noonee Doronila. The Threads Collective directed by barb barnett at The Street 2, Canberra, August 23-38, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 23
Four actors come together. Each began life somewhere else. Their stories gradually coalesce as each migrates to Australia. Their words and images are like short sequences from a documentary film which form a coherent picture only at the point where they perform their stories together on stage, in Australia, in Canberra, before this audience. The end.
The idea is interesting – certainly for a migrant like me with my own parallel story – but the writing is for the most part prosaic and the theatrical structure unexciting. Perhaps this is the result of the writers' becoming incorporated bodily and emotionally into Australia’s flat topography and culture.
The four stories represent multicultural reality in today’s Canberra. Camilla from Cornwall via London and Melbourne; Liliana from Poland via Austria and Adelaide; Raoul mixing India and Germany via London; Noonee from Manila via Melbourne. Each arrived in Australia at different ages on different dates in different decades, yet find they have similar experiences, dreams, confusions about their identity, while coming ‘home’ together in this work.
This is the positive value of Destination Home, especially in the face of those who decry multiculturalism as creating racial enclaves. None of these four have lost the ties to their original homelands, but all have stayed here. As Liliana puts it, “In Poland I am Australian; in Australia I am Polish” but there are freedoms here, despite the peculiar contradictions of Australian life, for which she stays. Each of them visit their England, Poland, Germany, India or the Philippines, but each has been changed by Australia and they cannot maintain the old relationships.
Despite sadness at the loss of the past, the final bow is a celebration, which the audience joins in, of simply being here to stay.
So the intention is valid, the motivation is genuine, while the theatrical expression is lacking. Raoul’s story is the most energetically played, while Camilla’s shows the greatest variety, but I see the work as still in progress, needing a good writer to work it up and for it to be performed by other actors. The work needs to be put at some distance from the original storytellers to create a drama with a clear sense of direction from scene to scene. As it stands, for most of the play the scenes seem too random, too amorphous, too evenly paced. I would take the script by the scruff of the neck, shake it about until it cries a bit, hisses back at me and tries to scratch with its claws out. Then I could drop it from a great height and watch it land on all fours and purr to everyone’s satisfaction.
