The Golden Age

Louis Nowra’s 1985 classic The Golden Age sprang from a decade when our playwrights  wrote not domestic snapshots but big picture, big cast, thematically ambitious epics.

Nowra’s ironically titled play follows the discovery after nearly a century of a lost tribe of convicts in the wilds of Tasmania, but also trips through the collapse of civilisations from ancient Greece to Nazi Germany.  This is no less than the clash of culture and nature, of classes, of settler and indigenous histories, and what’s forging our national identity.  

The lost tribe are inbred and afflicted but those who still speak do so in a richly lyrical, now localised amalgam of bawdy, lower-class slang and Georgian English.   Once discovered by two young bushwalkers, Queenie Ayre decides their outcastin’ days are over and they return to Hobart.  They are promptly hidden in an asylum by a government paranoid that news of their “degeneration” will prove the racist rantings of the Nazis.  

As the play then leaps between the gradual dying of the tribe and the horrors of war torn Berlin, director Kip Williams keeps a speedy focus and verisimilitude of performances, despite Nowra occasionally loosing his nimbleness under the weight of his great themes.   Robert Menzies is achingly poignant as Dr William Archer slumping into drunken guilt at the treatment of his patients, while indigenous actor Ursula Yovich naturally brings delicious irony playing his benignly patrician wife.  The colour blind casting is again more than neutral with Rabbiwuy Hick, who is warmly authentic as the spirited Betsheb.  In a broadly multicultural cast, Brandon McClelland plays her devoted discoverer, and later soldier shattered by war and her ruin, and Remy Hill is his well-born friend.

From the tribe, Liam Nunan shines as the disabled Stef and Zinozi Okenyo is imposing as Angel, both mute characters.  And Sarah Peirse reigns over all as the formidable, language rich Ayre.

All is played out inventively on a huge mound of dirt in David Fleischer’s stark set and in his torn costumes of periods past, lit by Damien Cooper. Max Lyandvert’s evocative sound vitally soars and welds between Nowra’s often cinematically fast scenes.

For Andrew Upton’s last STC season, this is a welcome and striking revival of a big thoughtful play still resonating like a bell.  And Nowra even finds room for a theatrical reverence to King Lear and Euripides.

Martin Portus

Images: top - Back: Robert Menzies, Sarah Peirse, Anthony Taufa. Front: Liam Nunan, Rarriwuy Hick and Zindzi Okenyo, & lower, Liam Nunan, Sarah Peirse, Brandon McClelland and Remy Hii in Sydney Theatre Company’s The Golden Age. Photographer: Lisa Tomasetti