A couple of weeks ago I attended a performance of The Golden Age - a play written by Louis Nowra in 1985.
The Golden Age - Synopsis
I found it interesting but also challenging as the "Lost Tribe" characters no longer spoke English but their own language based on Cockney, Irish and convict slang. Unlike at the Opera, there were no surtitles but the program did help a bit, but not that much.
Why "golden" I have not determined. Grim would have been a better description.
One by one the tribe members died, much like the Aborigines in Tasmania before them. These people were totally inbred, having been cut off from so-called civilisation for three generations, as their numbers dwindled. Their predecessors had gone mining, deep in the South West Wilderness.
It wasn't comfortable theatre and saddened me when the tribe were locked away in a mental asylum to hide them from the mainstream population.
We watched one young student, who had found the tribe, fall in love. His friend's father, a doctor became the translator for the tribespeople. But integration was never an option. And the doctor's obsession with observing behaviour and coping with his emotional response to their lives in incarceration by drinking himself insensible was unhelpful to the tribe's plight.
Much like the Government tries to silence anyone who dares speak out about the conditions in which we are holding asylum seekers in offshore detention.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment