“This is a play which in many senses should be mandatory viewing.…A seminal must-see.“
Kate Stratford
5 /5 message sticks
Riverside
The Visitors is performing at Riverside Theatres from October 19 to 21; and Illawarra Performing Arts Centre from October 25 to 28
It was always going to be poignant – seeing Muruwari writer Jane Harrison’s The Visitors less than a week after the referendum.
In British terms, it is 1788. As the First Fleet approaches, six Elders from different peoples and one young representative meet on the sandstone escarpment overlooking the harbour to discuss how they will react. Will they offer a welcome as custom demands? Or repel them? After all, when these visitors were here eighteen summers ago, the encounter was not pleasant. They borrowed things and kept them. (First Nations had no word for stealing as one borrowed or traded.) The visitors were violent and sneering. Disrespectful. The discussion moves back and forth, as committee discussions so often do. This is where we are all human – in the committee meeting. There is humour here; it seems no matter what race you belong to, the committee meeting functions in the same maddening way. But there is also a sense of the futility of this, for we in the audience know what is going to happen. And it isn’t pretty. Intimations are planted in the beginnings of influenza, contracted from a close encounter.
Director Wesley Enoch is at his best here, offering a dense, layered discussion about culture and perspective. His vision is beautifully rendered by Elizabeth Gadsby’s stunning design; an eternally sacred landscape on which we know profane things will happen. Lit by Karen Norris’ design, the space is lyrical and dreamlike. Imaginatively, the seven are costumed in business suits, giving a psychological access to the discussion the group is having. Yet each representative also has some sort of totem representing their people. No-one can be alienated from this discussion, as the meeting peers out into the distance at us. For we are the mob on the First Fleet.
The dedicated cast are outstanding in their commitment. Characters are clearly intentioned. Deeply aware of their heritage and responsibility, connected to land and the other, each one seriously explores the feelings and all have ensemble chemistry. The vibe is that of a local council meeting, weighing up arguments for and against and maddeningly unable to reach consensus. Until the end when they decide to offer a welcome, out of pity and a belief in sharing knowledge.
“Boat people” is not a new concept to most inhabitants of Australia. But there is a decided unwillingness to recognise that the British were, after all, the first boat people. The petty criminals and wastrel-son soldiers were banished to Australia in an act of ultimate punishment – dispossession of, and alienation from, country. It would be only too easy to deliver a diatribe here about the arrogance of white culture assuming its superiority in civilisation; in the concepts of prisons and capital punishment and the attitude of shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality – but what would that serve? The deathly grip so many have on the fear of difference, the creation of “other”, continues to divide us all and we remain unwilling to learn anything from anyone or anything different.
This is a play which in many senses should be mandatory viewing.
A seminal must-see.
Kate Stratford, Theatre Now
