There’s something thrilling about historical drama, a sense of being transported to another time and place.
Big Girls Don’t Cry, written by Dalara Williams and directed by Ian Michael, is set 1966 in Redfern. The fundamental question – how far have we come in sixty years? – is clear. The answer is less clear (for reasons I’ll return to later.)
The piece feels more like a slice of life than a narrative. Not that things don’t happen, but the purpose seems more the capturing of indigenous experience than the weaving of a story.
Queenie (Megan Wilding), Lulu (Stephanie Somerville) and Cheryl (Williams) are preparing for their debut. It’s the first one being held for indigenous women. Trouble is, Cheryl’s man Michael (Matthew Cooper) is overseas, fighting in Vietnam, and the other two women seem to be having difficulty finding a partner. Ernie (Guy Simon) has just returned from the Freedom Rides, with a vision of a better world, and with a friend, Milo (Nic English), who’s interested in Cheryl….
It’s a snap shot of a time and place, brimming with heart and humour.
The scene in which Ernie and Queenie work out their differences – or work out what’s at the heart of the differences – is comic gold.
But the piece is not merely light-hearted fluff. Within the first few minutes, we hear our first story of racial injustice. And this builds, until the end of the first act. By the time we’re confronted with a scene depicting racist brutality, we’ve heard several speeches complaining about its (incontestable) ubiquity, and afterwards we hear more. A play of this length – 2 hours 50 minutes with interval – would benefit from a greater trust in showing rather than telling.
As a historical drama, it’s oddly dissatisfying, partly stuck in the present while at other times lost in the past.
Sometimes, there’s a whiff of anachronism. Perhaps this is inevitable; we chose to tell a story set in the past but our purpose is still to speak to the present. I’ll begin with something really small (which might simply be an example that underlines my ignorance). The characters speak of living in the colony and ask others whether they’re allies to the indigenous cause. This language feels very 21st century, but perhaps it has taken sixty years for these usages to move beyond the indigenous community to the non-indigenous community.
Another potential anachronism is the presentation of the 1967 referendum. The play’s action occurs in the build up to this historical event and the referendum is referred to – but generally negatively, with responses like It won’t do enough and Who are they to make decisions about us? No doubt, this was part of the indigenous response. But, because of the iconic status of the referendum in the history of the civil rights movement, if it was so displeasing to indigenous people I would have loved to have had this displeasure more fully explored, especially in relationship to the hope manifest in movements like the Freedom Rides. But I suspect what we we’re getting is not a response to the 1967 referendum, but rather a response to the more recent, failed, one.
Yet, despite these examples suggesting the play speaks more of now than then, in other ways it’s firmly located in the past – and one that seems a foreign country.
Events lead up to the inaugural Sydney Indigenous debutante ball of 1966, but we’re left with tantalising gaps. How did the ball happen? Why did it happen? Considering a debutante ball is the epitome of privileged white upper middle class aspirational culture, and that Ernie uses the term assimilation in a totally understandably scathing way, I wanted to know more about how and why these women navigated this extraordinarily weird experience. (I know I’m probably being unreasonable, wanting more sociological analysis than a play like this – one sourced, at least partly, from personal testimony – can offer.)
How far have we come in sixty years? It’s difficult tell.
But there’s no doubt we’ve further to go.
Paul Gilchrist
Big Girls Don’t Cry by Dalara Williams
At Belvoir until 27 April
Image by Stephen Wilson Barker
Theatre Red 
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