Birds of the Moon
by Anna O’Connor
Patch Theatre Centre
South Australia
Director- Dave Brown, Designer- Kerry Reid, Composer- John Shortis, Choreographer- Guy Detot, Performers- Rosalind Aylmore, Nic Hurcombe.

Birds of the Moon, Dave Brown’s first production as Artistic Director of Patch Theatre Centre has been touring junior primaries with a simple tale of two migrating shearwaters. Otherwise known as muttonbirds, shearwaters breed in the islands of Bass Strait and along the southern coast of the mainland. Barely have they hatched when they head off on a 12,000k flight across the Pacific to Japan, the Aleutian Islands and the Arctic- returning again to their Australian habitat in September. Pacific Islanders called these intrepid creatures Birds of the Moon because, travelling in their many thousands, they seemed to have flown out of the moon itself.

From Anna O’Connor’s text Patch has developed a fifty minute narrative about Perky and Small One, two shearwaters who, having survived incubation, hatch into a world of uncertainty and adversity- snakes on the ground, storms in the air, fishing nets in the sea and RSI of the wing from six weeks continuous flying. It is well-judged story, clearly told and well paced.

Dave Brown has brought together an able team and come up with a nicely portable and highly attractive production. Designer Kerry Reid has created a circular aluminium frame, hung with painted silk landscapes, which encloses an acting area for about thirty littlies. The painted tarpaulin floor has clearly marked runways for shearwaters and so avoids ambiguity about performance boundaries. It is a good design- clear and neat but atmospheric, a cubby big enough for a class and two teachers.

Actors , Rosalind Aylmore and Nic Hurcombe give disciplined and likeable performances. Employing a mix of mime, dance and dialogue they also use masks. Some, like the albatross, which is inventively incorporated into the silk hangings, worked so well that maybe more could have been done. The music, composed by John Shortis, is spacious and evocative and greatly enhances the work overall, especially since both actors sing well.

The very quality of the production raises questions about theatre for this age group. The glittering eyes and rapt attention in the matinee audience at St Thomas’s Primary School, Goodwood, was ready proof that the show works. But I sometimes think that with productions of this kind the introductions and debriefings are miscalculated. Young audiences need to be guided in the protocol of live theatre but perhaps not to the extent that the experience is deprived of its magic. In this case, the story is clear, the peaks exciting, funny, affecting, disconcerting and ultimately triumphant. The audience, swept along by it all, only started to fidget during the gracious, but over-long question session afterwards.

Ros Aylmore and Nic Hurcombe had worked hard to create memorable theatre, which the kids’ comments suggested they had understood very well. Pre-occupied as we are with de-mystifying the world about us we can forget that some mysteries are legitimate. Workshopping a theatrical experience too comprehensively can mean that we murder to dissect, as Mr Wordsworth used to say. It is the task of theatre to enthrall – why not make the most of it? These comments are general ones rather than quibbles of this production. With Birds of the Moon Patch has done well and we look forward to more work of this quality from Dave Brown.

Financial Review, July, 30, 1992. (?)