Kristina Olsson’s Boy, Lost

The novel Boy, Lost by Kristina Olsson tells her mother’s heart-breaking story of being separated from her first child, Peter, as she flees an abusive marriage in the early 1950s. The story covers an intervening four decades until the two are reunited, with all the ramifications of the loss and scars of the past on the family. This production by the team at Belloo has a stage adaptation by Katherine Lyall-Watson and is directed by Caroline Dunphy. It’s a neatly done and poetic work that uses stripped-back tools of the theatre to help keep the performers’ craft central to the storytelling. There is a sparse set design and simple costumes (designed by Penny Challen) that allow the dramatic skills of a talented cast to take centre stage. Costumes help to change roles and scenes are brought to life using stage devices and clever lighting design by David Walters, helping us travel in time to the past and back again. There is an evocative sound design by Guy Webster and musical pieces by composer/performer Morgan Francis.

The show’s program simply calls each performer ‘Actor 1’, ‘Actor 2’ and so on, but the actors do play specific characters and narrate the story as it unfolds. I think the anonymizing is a way of reinforcing that, while this is Kristina Olsson’s family story, the script highlights that this is just one of many similar stories of children taken from their parents at less-enlightened times in our recent history. And, while the cast do play multiple roles (some swaps more effective than others), there is some very real acting going on here to bring very real characters to life. Hsiao-Ling Tang is a warm and generous performer and is wonderful as Kristina’s mother, Yvonne. Morgan Francis (also the composer for the piece, which integrates music in the storytelling) as Kristina’s half-brother, Peter, the boy lost at the centre of the story.

Zoë Houghton is Kristina Olsson’s daughter and so she brings her gravitas to the production, but also a softer edge portraying her own Aunty Sharon who deals with the emotions of a young girl coming to terms with the fact that she has an older brother who she has never met.

As Yvonne’s abusive first husband (father to Peter and Sharon) Stephen Geronimos has a difficult role, but he manages to show the characters’ complex personality, ingrained with his own societal expectations and frustrations. Stephen and Morgan work well together to show a complicated relationship between a violent parent and abused child.

Colin Smith adds a gentle calm in his portrayal of Yvonne’s second husband (Kristina’s father) who accepts all the traumas of his wife’s first marriage without question. It is refreshing to see this strong and loving man portrayed with such finesse.

In our age of binge TV dramas and soap operas, some fictional stories over-dramatise, over-confront and call on their performers to overact. It is very moving to see this true family story turn a very dramatic series of events into a poetic piece that engages you – it never force-feeds – and encourages you to think about other people’s contexts and the background to the institutions that we allowed to develop in our society. But this production also has humour and there is a certain reality that, with love and honesty, our human instinct is to accept and carry on with warmth and dignity – and that’s what the Olsson family has done. This production is highly recommended.

Find out more: https://queenslandtheatre.com.au/plays/boy-lost

Beth Keehn

Photo Credit: Cinnamon Smith