Set against a
backdrop of an old tarpauline, a ring of old packing boxes and crates, jerry
cans and metal drums are set around the tiny Belvoir Downstairs space. As items
are bought on – a cardboard box, an iron, a chair, table cloth, blanket – we
see the beginnings of a house emerge. It could be a stage anywhere, a makeshift
space made from whatever is at hand, and it seems perfectly suited to the
warmth and intimacy inherent in the space. The first scene – a clever and sly
depiction of a pre-invasion culture – soon gives way to a heated and
politically-charged vision of Christian missionaries in Aboriginal communities,
and we are thrust into the middle of The
Cake Man’s grist, its political and social backdrop writ large upon its
face.
A co-production
between Belvoir and Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, The Cake Man
was written by Robert J. Merritt in the 1970s, and was the first full-length play staged by the
National Black Theatre in Redfern. In the intervening forty years, we are
ashamed to realise perhaps how little has changed, how racism and intolerance
is still ingrained in our way of thinking no matter how much we’d like to think
to the contrary, and The Cake Man
becomes a sly indigenous perspective on white paternalism.
