If you’ve passed through Australian drama, Australian literature, you know this place.
It’s a country town.
The townspeople are small, they are broken.
They have names like Killer and Runt.
The landscape is riven by a tension. On one side, the trivialities of human society: the servo, the takeaway shop. On the other side, the ferocious beauty of nature: the bush, the river, the sea.
In this place, you are an adolescent.
And, desperately, you need to leave.
These type of stories reflect the personal experience of some of us. But, for most of us, they function symbolically. They effectively express our deep dissatisfaction with modern Australia and its perception of what it is to be an adult, of what is a full human life.
I’ll admit, I often find these type of stories disappointing. It’s not that I haven’t felt the sense of being trapped they express, but I’m frustrated that they always seem to end right where I believe the story begins, at the escape. It’s as though the actual step into maturity is inconceivable, it’s representation impossible.
It’s as though this place seems to negate all alternatives.
But, with Eden, Kate Gaul not only shows she knows this place, she has understood it.
Gaul’s script tells the story of two teenage girls, trapped in this place. But her presentation pushes always to liberty and to openness.
Firstly, the voice. The girls tell their own story. Though there are moments of dramatic realism, the majority of the piece is direct address. We’re not served a purported factual picture; we’re spoken to by characters with agency, women in charge of their own narrative.
Secondly, the beautiful poetry. Much of this poetry is observational, in that Truth is the goal, rather than a reductive coherence. Of some pieces you can say This a beautiful gem, because it’s as though you can hold it up to the light, complete, and by turning it, and looking at it from different angles, you can see how the multiple parts fit together to create a single whole. Gaul’s rich poetry resists this; it’s not stone-solid, it’s fluid, like a moving body of water. (Example: the river that runs by the town is a motif that resists simple interpretation. Likewise, the title, Eden. If Paradise, is it irony? Or is this place the place of the Fall? Or is it where the story, all stories, must begin?)
Thirdly, the narrative. The town is initially established as a place of male misbehaviour and violence: a teen gang named the Mongrels marauds the streets; one of the girl’s fathers has left her mother for a younger woman; the other girl’s father is a wife-beater. But their escape? Honest admission: I didn’t understand the final fifth of the text, I didn’t understand what was happening. But what might lead to frustration with other pieces, is here a continuing invitation to openness. Freedom is that which does not slam shut.
Gaul directs her script magnificently. Simple staging forefronts the ever-fascinating language. Nate Edmondson’s soundscape powerfully underlines key moods and tonal changes (and, I suspect, could be listened to and enjoyed for its own sake.)
Actors Karrine Kanaan and Lara Lightfoot are splendid. They skilfully move between different characters, but it’s in the presentation of Gaul’s language that they particularly shine. This is poetry performed, rather than vernacular speech patterns imitated. This heightening is key. I suggested earlier Gaul not only knows this place, but understands it: it is a place of containment, of smallness, of perpetual reference to what-has-been rather than what-could-be. And if there can be an intimation of what follows the escape, it can’t be another tiny truth, but a flourishing – like this.
Paul Gilchrist
Eden by Kate Gaul
presented by Siren Theatre Company
at The Substation, Qtopia, until 18 April
Image by Natalia Ladyko
Theatre Red 