Adelaide Festival
\nBRIEF
\nEchoes of history in the quarry<\/p>\n
The Secret River
\nby Kate Grenville
\nAdapted for the stage by Andrew Bovell
\nA Sydney Theatre Company Production
\nPresented by Adelaide Festival
\nand State Theatre Company South Australia
\nAnstey Hill Quarry, Adelaide
\nMarch 2. Until March 19.<\/p>\n
The revival, for the 2017 Adelaide Festival, of Sydney Theatre Company\u2019s The Secret River, <\/em>adapted for the stage by Andrew Bovell from the novel by Kate Grenville, has proved to be its transformation. Director Neil Armfield has always said it was a work in progress and now, with this transfixing production, we can see how far it has come.<\/p>\n Grenville\u2019s fictionalised version of her forebears claiming land along the Hawkesbury River is a grim account of miscommunication, conflict and murder between European settlers and the Aboriginal communities whose land had been invaded. It also proposes a view that some tragedies could have been averted. It is story of multiple perspectives, some contested, that challenge all who encounter it.<\/p>\n The Anstey Hill Quarry near Tea Tree Gully has an important place in Adelaide Festival history. In 1980 the legendary Peter Brook\u2019s company performed, Conference of the Birds<\/em>, there, followed in 1988 by his epic work, The Mahabharata<\/em>. State Theatre CEO, Rob Brookman worked on both those ventures and had no difficulty persuading Festival directors, Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy, to return to Anstey Hill to stage The Secret River<\/em>. The result has been a triumph.<\/p>\n Designer Stephen Curtis has the benefit of a spectacular thirty metre rock face, partly covered with scrub, as backdrop to his pale green performance space. And, once the sun has gone, Mark Howett\u2019s lighting captures texture and tints the night sky. The voices of the actors ring in the clear air \u2013from Dhirrumbin\u2019s prologue (from the majestic Ningali Lawford Wolf) to the concluding, heart-rending sound of Shaka Cook singing Ngalamalum\u2019s lament.<\/p>\n The performances are excellent \u2013 Nathaniel Dean and Georgia Adamson as the hopeful pioneers, the Thornhills, Stephen Goldsmith, commanding as the elder Yalamundi, and Richard Piper, daubed in expressionist face paint, as the depraved Smasher Sullivan. Iain Grandage\u2019s live music score is superb and the set pieces of the Dharug ceremonies and the settlers\u2019 Blighty songs are impressively staged.<\/p>\n But no memory of this production is more enduring than the sound of muskets on Kaurna land, at a location so quintessentially Australian that the implications of the events that occurred at this river can never be secret again.<\/p>\n Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n Published in abridged form as \u201cEchoes of history in the quarry\u201d The Australian<\/em>, March 6, 2017, p.12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Adelaide Festival BRIEF Echoes of history in the quarry The Secret River by Kate Grenville Adapted for the stage by Andrew Bovell A Sydney Theatre Company Production Presented by Adelaide Festival and State Theatre Company South Australia Anstey Hill Quarry, Adelaide March 2. Until March 19. The revival, for the 2017 Adelaide Festival, of Sydney Theatre Company\u2019s The Secret River, adapted for the stage by Andrew Bovell from the novel by Kate Grenville, has proved to be its transformation. Director […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,5,11,14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-37","category-archive","category-festival","category-state-theatre-company","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2750"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2751,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2750\/revisions\/2751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}