Lest we forget: ATYP’s A Town Named War Boy

Presented by ATYP and the State Library of New South Wales, Ross Mueller’s A Town Named War Boy takes a collage-like approach to storytelling: rather than tell the story of one person, he has used fragments of diaries in the State Library’s collection to create an impression of the campaign, both in the trenches and the journey from Australia.

Ostensibly the story of four young men – Snow, Huddo, Tom, and John – it is Snow who Mueller’s impressions centre around, whose story we follow from a small country town in Victoria to the cliffs in Turkey and back again. Mueller’s writing, as in all his work, is muscular and vernacular; there is a robust command of the language which, when delivered by these four young actors, seems entirely natural and effortless. Mixing more contemporary speech patterns with those of a century ago, Mueller creates many haunting images and moments which are brought to life by director Fraser Corfield, designers Adrienn Lord (set and costume), Emma Lockhart-Wilson (lighting), Steve Francis (composer), Alistair Wallace (sound), and the cast.

Letters from the front: Ensemble’s The ANZAC Project

As the Western world bands together to commemorate the various centenaries of the First World War, there is any number of concerts, plays, books, films, television series and CDs to mark the occasion. To mark the centenary of the Gallipoli landing, the Ensemble theatre is staging The ANZAC Project, a double-bill of two new plays, which looks at the event and asks ‘what does it mean to us, now, here, today?’ Ensemble theatre is not alone in asking these questions, but perhaps we should all be taking a leaf out of these umpteen commemorations and asking ourselves ‘why is this military failure so celebrated?’

The ANZAC Project is comprised of two new plays – ‘Dear Mum and Dad’, by Geoffrey Atherden, in which a woman discovers a letter from her great-grandfather and learns of his experiences during World War I; and ‘Light Begins To Fade’, by Vanessa Bates, in which several stories intertwine, not least a group of television writers trying to find their way to tell the story of the Gallipoli landing, and the wider issues it opens up. While united in theme and idea, these plays work in very different ways and, ultimately, Bates’ is the more successful, the more theatrical.

Lest we forget: Sydney Festival’s Black Diggers

Every so often a theatre production stands head and shoulders above everything else, a production that stands out as a landmark event because of its social and cultural significance, because of it’s bearing on the shaping of Australia’s national psyche. Sydney Theatre Company’s The Secret River was perhaps such a production. Now, a year later, Sydney Festival and Queensland Theatre Company, in association with the Balnaves Foundation, present Black Diggers, an ambitious and monumentally affecting production which shines a long-overdue light on the contribution of Aboriginal soldiers in the Great War.

Like The Secret River, Black Diggers comes at a time when we, as a nation, must face the past and learn from it, when we must acknowledge the contribution people have played in the shaping of the country we know today. Directed by Wesley Enoch, we follow the stories of several archetypal figures as they travel from their homelands to the battlefields of Gallipoli, the Middle East, and the Western Front. Far from being jingoistic or representative, the result is an engrossing, harrowing and emotionally charged one-hundred minutes of unavoidably powerful theatre that does not shy away from the ugly truths of war and its legacy.