21 Forster Street

If you go to Domain and look up 21 Forster Street, you’ll find a home as it was just before Kate Waldon sold it in 2019 – a grand house lovingly restored by Kate’s father with a spiral staircase, glorious stained windows, beautiful colours.  Search the Canberra real estate website Allhomes, and you’ll find the house as it was previously. There’s a presence stamped here too; in quirky mezzanine bed nooks, the crazy paved splashback, a tree house and tire swing. 21 Foster Street is the product of Ms Waldon’s research into the people who lived, worked, and some died, in the house where her beloved father died under the stained glass windows, creating a show suffused with affection, as warm as a glowing wood fire.

By combining physical theatre, recorded interview, slapstick, period props and her own home movies, Ms Walder creates mood and narrative with movement, light and sound, with only a spare use of dialogue. The mood is amplified by the stunning original, period appropriate music by composer John Shortis (of Shortis and Simpson fame), drawing from from folk, silent movie music and 80s electronic sounds.

The result is a series of beautifully crafted vignettes, with a delicate humour and pathos. We see the family who first built the house in the 1860s going about their daily lives and the labour and danger involved in even the simplest of tasks. Later, the house served as the surgery of a doctor rumoured to have a disturbing relationship to body parts, a sequence told through a lively and very funny Buster Keating-eque routine.

Taking the parts of the various characters through time, Damien Warren-Smith, Poppy Lynch and Kate Walder herself perform physical comedy with perfect timing and co-ordination with each other and the sound and lighting team. The mood changes from light and wistful to longing, regret, love and grief when the author explores how her emotions about the house are bound with her love for her father, how he shaped the house during their two decades there, and how that in turn shaped her.

This show is utterly delightful and achingly personal. It will leave audiences thinking about how they relate to the space they occupy, which existed before they arrived and will exist after they leave. Go see it while you have the chance.

Cathy Bannister

Image: Photox - Canberra Photography Services