1990

No Sugar

by Jack Davis

Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney and

Western Australian Theatre Company

Tandanya Theatre, October 1990.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

No Sugar is Jack Davis’ third play. After Kullark in 1978 and The Dreamers four years later, he was commissioned by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1984 to write two plays. That must be some of the best grant money ever spent. The results were Honey Spot, a splendid play for young people which  premiered at Come Out in 1985 and No Sugar which was presented in the 1985 Festival of Perth. Davis then went on to write Barungin which we saw here in the 1988 Festival. Raising questions about Aboriginal deaths in custody it was one of the very few theatre works to consider what it meant to be a Nyoongah in somebody else’s bicentenary.

The current tour of No Sugar and Bran Nue Dae has given Adelaide audiences a chance to see two very different works of distinction. The strange brew of nostalgia, romance, evangelism and hokum in Jimmy Chi’s Bran Nue Dae is both breathtakingly gauche and genuinely moving while No Sugar, five years on from its first performance, is simply a classic.

Jack Davis has devoted his life to the Nyoongarah people in the south west of WA and his public achievements are epic. That he turned to writing plays at sixty-one is a piece of very good fortune for Australian drama. No Sugar draws on his own experiences in the infamous Moore River Native Settlement in the early 1930’s. The Depression enveloping the entire community was bearing down even harder on the blacks in WA. Rationing was becoming draconian ; first no soap, then no meat. On top of this the official policy towards Aboriginals was crudely racist and viciously dictatorial. “The native must helped,” wrote the Chief Protector A.O.Neville, “in spite of himself.”

Davis focuses on three generations of the Millimurra family camped in Northam and shunted to Moore River just before a state election. They daily confront the demeaning edicts of the Protector’s office as interpreted by local cops only too pleased to pass decisions on for the next pen pusher to worry about.

With three main acting areas- a bush camp flanked on each side of the stage by two desks, one for A.O.Neville in Perth, the other for Sergeant Carrol in Northam, Davis shows how orders pass down the line and throw a family into turmoil. He goes to some trouble to show that decisions are in part good-intentioned and that some of the agents are well-meaning. But it doesn’t mean squiddley as far as the Millimurras are concerned. No Sugar has the same direct narrative and unequivocal identification that distinguishes Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The terms are heroic, the truths we find to be self-evident.

The WATC touring production has been directed by Neil Armfield and Lynette Narkle although one suspects that the work of Davis’ longtime collaborator Andrew Ross is still in evidence. Whatever, wisely, neither Lynette Narkle, a foundation member of Davis’ Marli Biyol Company and the original Milly in No Sugar, nor Armfield has distinctively imprinted the production. They, like Ross, understand that Davis’ play works best under-directed, sparsely set and with strong, sometimes artless, performances.

Of the original cast Lynette Narkle and Morton Hansen give substance to Milly and Sam while Dot Collard, Jack Davis’ sister, is again memorable as Gran. Assistant Director, Kelton Pell stood in as Joe and Jack Charles gives a spirited, witty performance in the pivotal role of Jimmy. Peter Collingwood steers a careful path as Neville. Interestingly, Armfield floods him with disfiguring footlights when his speech  is at its most enlightened. Eileen Colocott and Andy King are suitably disturbing as Matron and N.S. Neal, custodians of Moore River and  Steve Dodd’s Billy, an elder humiliated by servitude to  Neal, is also well-drawn.

No Sugar is instinctively well-shaped in the writing and so its success proceeds from there. In being both  fearless and blithe Davis gets beyond cliche to something essential. Sentimentality becomes true feeling and anger, purposeful and forward looking. This is genuinely communal theatre – sweet in its generosity, fierce in its reproach and as plain and restorative as day.

“Sweet Revenge” The Adelaide Review, No.82, November, 1990, p.26.