Yellingbo

The ever adaptable La Mama space becomes a comfortable family home.  An Australian couple, much in love, are hoping for a baby.  Suddenly, the man’s erstwhile and estranged love appears, a secret past and a deception are revealed, all is thrown into disarray, and all are tested.  If Yellingbo sounds like melodrama, well, yes, but the story is credible, far more intriguing, and far more morally ambiguous than that term would suggest. 

Yellingbo ( ‘today’ in Woi wurrung) is a ‘problem play’ in that it deals with, indeed dramatises, a current – i.e., of today - social issue in a naturalistic setting.  Here, the ‘issue’ is our country’s treatment of refugees – not just their open-ended incarceration but also their fate should they be sent back ‘where they came from’.  The issue here is dramatized not as a matter of abstract discussion of pros and cons but made personal with much at stake for the characters.  It’s not ‘a dilemma’: it’s their dilemma.  

Playwright Tee O’Neil, inspired by personal experience, has given us a beautifully constructed text, with careful attention to set-ups and credible payoffs.  It’s impossible to be more specific without spoilers that would ruin the skilfully managed rising tension in the twists and turns of the plot. 

Jeremy Stanford, as the husband Dan, might be perhaps a little big and over-enthusiastic for the La Mama HQ space, but he delivers forcefully all the dismay, anger, and ambivalence of his character.  Jude Beaumont is necessarily fierce as the play’s catalyst and a clearly desperate woman.  Fiona Macleod, in a fine and subtle performance, gives us someone who – totally unexpectedly – has her life turned upside down and risks losing everything.

For a play freighted not just with its issue but also a great deal of complex backstory, there is inevitably much exposition and some ‘on the nose’ dialogue, but Tee O’Neil’s text, director Karen Berger’s pacing, and her direction of the cast’s performances put real pressure behind the reveals.  We are hungry for them.  Tension rises as we empathise and feel how much rides on the characters’ decisions.  

Yellingbo is an intriguing and morally complex play that asks, ‘What would you do?’  What the characters do may not be what you would do, but you are held to the end.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill.