Theatre of war: STC's The Long Way Home

While the physical results of war, of being involved in war, are sometimes easy to notice, the psychological and emotional results are not. Often going undetected, they can make the transition from serving in the military to civilian life hard, for both the returned soldiers and their families. As part of the rehabilitation process, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and Sydney Theatre Company have joined forces to stage The Long Way Home, a kind of theatrical collage of scenes, anecdotes, video snippets and excerpts from life.

Written by Daniel Keene and directed by Stephen Rayne, The Long Way Home is not quite verbatim theatre, nor is it a theatrical documentary, as we have seen previously in Belvoir’s Beautiful One Day or Coranderrk, say. Rather, as Keene writes in the program, “every situation that it presents and every line of dialogue is born out of the experiences of the soldiers who will perform the play. They play themselves reimagined.” It’s a bold move, and rightly so, as all involved are acutely aware that you cannot replicate wars or ‘real life’ on stage. “The theatre is the perfect place for this kind of meeting,” Keene continues, “a place where truth and fiction can co-exist, where reality can be imagined.”

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.