The Shiralee brings a Shakespearean energy to the Aussie swag-man’s life
- Written by Kirk Dodd, Lecturer in English and Writing, University of Sydney
A lyrical homage to the spirit of the Australian bush, Sydney Theatre Company’s The Shiralee is set on the highways and byways of 1950s Australia, with brief visits to the urban squalor of Kings Cross.
Adapted by Kate Mulvany and directed by Jessica Arthur, there is something Shakespearean about the play’s shifting between the cruel city and the pastoral expanses of the bush.
Mulvany’s adaptation of the classic 1955 D’Arcy Niland novel tries to refocus the story through the perspective of Buster (Ziggy Resnick), the young girl asked to navigate an adult’s world of violence and exile.
When her father, a hardened swagman named Mac Macauley (a mesmerising Josh McConville), rescues her from neglect in Kings Cross, they are persued by police and hit the road to embrace the gruelling swag-man’s life.
Buster proves herself a resilient force who defies the harshness of their travails and helps her father confront his own childhood trauma.
Going bush
The tranquillity of the bush plays an ever-present soothing role, despite the turmoils of the swaggies beneath her boughs. Jeremy Allen’s set design is clean, highly textured and full of colour.
Two impressive towering gum trees are wheeled slowly about on casters to effect a range of bush-land tracks and camps. Trent Suidgeest’s superb lighting bathes the scrub in golden hues or morning glows. Jessica Dunn’s sound design ensures the atmospherics are subtle and engrossing.
All this is a testament to Mulvany’s playwriting, who ensures each scene builds and propels the characters forward. The scenes roll together at a cracking pace, yet without feeling rushed. Mulvany also inserts bush poems throughout the play in interesting ways, creating a lyrical alchemy.
Outstanding performances
Mac’s journey adroitly models the hero’s journey, popularised by comparative mythology academic Joseph Campbell. Each of the characters, too, accord readily with the archetypes Campbell spelt out, including the hero (Mac), herald (Marge) and mentor (Buster and Lily).
In this hero’s role, the surly and brusque Mac Macauley is the story’s true protagonist.
Built like a brick outhouse, McConville fully embodies the gruff rover, unfazed by bare-knuckle boxing matches to win prize money. As D’Arcy’s novel affirms, “He was a man of thirty-five, built like a cenotaph, squat and solid”.
McConville moves like an Australian Stanley Kowalski, drifting through the outback in search of labour.
Rural women are drawn to his charms. Lily (Catherine Văn-Davies) is the belle of Grafton, in love with Mac but understanding his roving life. Văn-Davies also doubles as Minny, the salacious pie-shop owner in another town who gets Mac to help her “shift some sacks of sugar” out the back.
Resnick is fiercely vivacious as the child Buster, determined to be fathered by the stolid man who resists this title. Mulvany increases Buster’s age to 10, no longer Niland’s “four-year-old bundle of loyalty and fortitude”. This brings her closer to the age of Mac’s own childhood trauma, and increases her shrewdness about the adult world. Her singing “I like aeroplane jelly” becomes a nostalgic chorus throughout the bush.
Buster’s fraught mother Marge (Mulvany) drops her guard when Mac is out roving. Robust yet brittle, Mulvany excels as a woman shaped by hardship and regret.
The roguish Beauty (a compelling Aaron Pedersen) is the roughhouse organiser of prizefights, besotted by his wife Bella (Lucia Mastrantone). Mastrantone steals ovations as an outback Italian starved of company, in one scene bounding about like an excited chihuahua to welcome Mac and Buster with a glorious mismatch of Aussie–Italian endearments.
Paul Capsis shines gloriously as Ruby Razzle.
Prudence Upton/Sydney Theatre Company
Paul Capsis shines gloriously as Ruby Razzle, an elegant nightclub singer in a stunning black sequined number, and as Desmond the bicycling bush poet, whose lover is in the Big House for daring to love a man.
Where the play explores the respectful collegiality of the swaggies in the bush, it is Desmond that rallies the most.
A complex bildungsroman
This Shiralee presents a complex bildungsroman: the story of a young person’s journey from childhood to adulthood (or from immaturity to maturity).
It is not Buster’s journey, who clearly matures but never becomes adult. Instead, Buster’s childish influence on her father allows him to reflect on his own traumatic childhood and complete a process of individuation.
The “shiralee” refers to a tramp’s bundle or swag, a resonant metaphor for this tale. Where Buster becomes an unwanted bundle for Mac to carry, she helps him unravel his inner shiralee, the emotional baggage he has carried for too long.
The Shiralee is at the Sydney Opera House for the Sydney Theatre Company until November 29.
Authors: Kirk Dodd, Lecturer in English and Writing, University of Sydney
