Destination Home written and performed by Camilla Blunden,
Liliana Bogatko, Raoul Craemer and Noonee Doronila. The Threads
Collective directed by barb barnett at The Street 2, Canberra, August
23-38, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 23
Four
actors come together. Each began life somewhere else. Their stories
gradually coalesce as each migrates to Australia. Their words and
images are like short sequences from a documentary film which form a
coherent picture only at the point where they perform their stories
together on stage, in Australia, in Canberra, before this audience. The
end.
The idea is interesting – certainly for a migrant
like me with my own parallel story – but the writing is for the most
part prosaic and the theatrical structure unexciting. Perhaps this is
the result of the writers' becoming incorporated bodily and emotionally
into Australia’s flat topography and culture.
The four
stories represent multicultural reality in today’s Canberra. Camilla
from Cornwall via London and Melbourne; Liliana from Poland via Austria
and Adelaide; Raoul mixing India and Germany via London; Noonee from
Manila via Melbourne. Each arrived in Australia at different ages on
different dates in different decades, yet find they have similar
experiences, dreams, confusions about their identity, while coming
‘home’ together in this work.
This is the positive value of Destination Home,
especially in the face of those who decry multiculturalism as creating
racial enclaves. None of these four have lost the ties to their
original homelands, but all have stayed here. As Liliana puts it, “In
Poland I am Australian; in Australia I am Polish” but there are freedoms
here, despite the peculiar contradictions of Australian life, for
which she stays. Each of them visit their England, Poland, Germany,
India or the Philippines, but each has been changed by Australia and
they cannot maintain the old relationships.
Despite
sadness at the loss of the past, the final bow is a celebration, which
the audience joins in, of simply being here to stay.
So
the intention is valid, the motivation is genuine, while the theatrical
expression is lacking. Raoul’s story is the most energetically played,
while Camilla’s shows the greatest variety, but I see the work as still
in progress, needing a good writer to work it up and for it to be
performed by other actors. The work needs to be put at some distance
from the original storytellers to create a drama with a clear sense of
direction from scene to scene. As it stands, for most of the play the
scenes seem too random, too amorphous, too evenly paced. I would take
the script by the scruff of the neck, shake it about until it cries a
bit, hisses back at me and tries to scratch with its claws out. Then I
could drop it from a great height and watch it land on all fours and
purr to everyone’s satisfaction.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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