Theatre review: The Secret River

While Peter Gynt has a stint up at the Edinburgh Festival the National does a straight swap, with the Sydney Theatre Company’s visiting production of The Secret River coming to the Olivier for a couple of weeks’ run (minus its narrator Ningali Lawford-Wolf, who died suddenly during the Edinburgh run; Pauline Whyman has been flown over to read in the role.) Andrew Bovell’s play adapts Kate Grenville’s novel about the bloody origin story of modern Australia, one that mirrors the treatment of the Native Americans but is arguably less well-known internationally. William Thornhill (Nathaniel Dean) has had his death sentence for theft commuted to transportation, and his wife Sal (Georgia Adamson) and sons have followed him to Australia. Once his sentence is up, Sal wants them to go straight back to London but William asks her to wait five years so they can build up enough money through farming to return in more comfort than they left.

Taking his family into the Outback and choosing a fertile plot in a river bend, Thornhill marvels at the fact that he used to be a penniless crook but just by staking his claim he can become the owner of land he’s given his name to.

Eddie Izzard used to have a routine about colonialism and flags, in which the first settlers to America stake their claim to land that’s completely uninhabited, as long as you ignore all those native people who inhabit it. The Secret River is essentially a deadly serious retelling of this: Where other former convicts in the area deal with the local Dharug people with everything from integration to violent hostility, Thornhill cultivates a blind spot about their very presence, blithely assuring himself and others that they’ll move on of their own volition sooner or later. When they fail to do so, and in fact seem to consider themselves entitled to the crops grown on their ancestral land for some reason, he becomes increasingly aggressive, and with similar feelings growing among the other white settlers the violent ending that’s loomed over the entire show becomes inevitable.

The key to the heartbreaking aspect of Grenville’s story is the way it keeps presenting the opportunities for more peaceful paths that aren’t taken – Thornhill’s sons start to play with the Dharug children and even Sal makes friends of a sort with the women, although she refuses to bother learning Gilyagan’s (Dubs Yunupingu) name and just rechristens her for her own convenience. Ironically the play itself could do with treating the Aboriginal characters a bit more as people in their own right, as (possibly because all of their dialogue is in untranslated Dharug language) we only really get to know them in terms of their relation to the white characters. And the play treats Thornhill as a kind of tragic anti-hero, which he’s frankly too unlikeable to pull off; his increasingly racist approach to the Dharug boils down to his pathological need to be king of his castle, that even sees him insist his childhood friend Dan (Joshua Brennan) call him “Mr Thornhill” when he comes to work for him. It probably doesn’t help that I found Dean’s attempt at a London accent offputtingly bad – it’s almost impressive to simultaneously aim for every accent native to the British Isles and miss all of them, to the point of sometimes being incomprehensible; most of the other actors playing English ex-cons don’t bother and it’s not to the show’s detriment.

Neil Armfield’s leisurely production’s strengths are in its epic sweep, with Stephen Curtis’ set design taking the chalk landscape as a theme – the white surface gets dirtied and eroded by all the feet walking over it, and chalk is used as face-paint, and for Sal to count off the days of the five years she still tells herself her husband will stick to before taking her home, while the dust is memorably used to evoke gunfire. It’s a moving evening, overly ponderous at times, but with enough life and light moments along the way both to keep it from getting bogged down, and to provide a bittersweet contrast to the looming tragedy.

The Secret River by Andrew Bovell, based on the novel by Kate Grenville, is booking until the 7th of September at the National Theatre’s Olivier.

Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Ryan Buchanan.