The Flood

With an all-star cast and crew and Patrick White Award winning playwright Jackie Smith, you’d expect this to be impressive, and it is. The play opens to a country lounge room so buried in magazine clippings that it looks as though it’s already been flooded. In the centre sits Janet, snipping random bits of brochure, rambling about dogs and being able to hear her husband Brian arriving home. She’s clearly unhinged, although whether it’s Alzheimer’s or some other madness is hard to tell. When daughter Catherine arrives, having been 20 years in England, Janet refuses to open the door and claims not to know her. Later she claims to have committed a dreadful act decades before. But has dementia caused her to become confused? Janet’s elder daughter Dorothy is disturbingly blasé about her mother’s condition and Catherine tries to leave, but finds herself trapped, leading to an uncomfortable night where long hidden horrors are slowly revealed.

The flood of the title is literal—referring to the threat of the nearby overflowing river, isolating the family, and to the deluge in which the girls’ father disappeared—but is also metaphorical, a destructive but ultimately cleansing deluge of emotion.

This piece fits well into the tradition of Australian gothic, picking up on that certain fear and fascination non-indigenous Australians have of being isolated in the bush. Country towns, and the bush itself, have often been portrayed as threatening places, and there’s something of the feel of Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright here. Author Jackie Smith has drawn multi-layered psychological portraits of a family in crisis, each character complex and very country Australian, all presented with pitch black humour. Smith plays with the truth—there are lies, and lies within lies that the characters believe to protect themselves and others from having to face horrifying realities.

Director Laurence Strangio has tuned the performances to perfection. Maude Davey gives a nuanced performance as Dorothy, a rough-as-guts country woman calloused over with defence mechanisms. Caroline Lee imbues the awkward, out of place Catherine with a certain innocence. If there is a standout, it would be Shirley Cattunar’s remarkable and energetic performance as the senile Janet, inhabiting the character absolutely convincingly. The lighting, set and sound design, with sheer walls through which frightening Arthur Boyd-esque gums loom, exaggerate the gloom outside while moving to a naturalistic interior – you almost expect to smell the old house and the rain.

This story is harrowing, visceral and satisfying, exploring how a distant horror can have effects for years afterwards, with humour but without sentimentality and ending on a note of hope. Highly recommended.

Cathy Bannister