Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan | Adelaide Festival 2022 review
By using an oratorio, Neil Armfield has masterfully elevated the 50th anniversary of the Adelaide drowning of Dr George Duncan to sanctify and celebrate the reform it provoked.
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Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan
Opera – Australia
ADELAIDE FESTIVAL
Dunstan Playhouse
Until March 8
George Duncan was tossed into the Torrens 50 years ago by a bunch of men who joked that faggots should float.
His drowning sparked 30 years of investigations, recriminations and breakout homosexual law reform, and now, in 2022, a world premiere oratorio at the Adelaide Festival.
This major production is directed by Neil Armfield, with the Adelaide Chamber Singers and pit orchestra conducted by Christie Anderson, plus soloists and a single dancer dangling in jeopardy over water.
By taking the form of an oratorio, the work is very clearly setting about elevating and sanctifying the death and the meaning of the death.
The drowning of Duncan was a turning point in Australian legal reform on homosexuality and presaged the defiant LGBTQIA+ cultural changes that are still resonating through our society.
That idea is delivered with style by composer Joseph Twist’s richly textured and sonorous choral music which stays, most of the time, within the sober conventions of the oratorio form, wondrously executed by the Chamber Singers and ensemble.
It is only the irrepressible nature of gay pride that sees it break out into jive and disco.
When the Chamber Singers get their rocks off in chorus line dances, Armfield is masterfully celebrating the world that Duncan helped bring into being.
The action takes place on a stage above water, and projections on a large screen behind set the action firmly in Adelaide and along the Torrens.
An overlay of bubbles is enough to give the impression that we are, like the ghost of this particular Duncan, viewing the aftermath from the bottom of the ancient Torrens that has seen everything: The Karrawirraparri of old.
The libretto from Alana Valentine and Christos Tsiolkas clearly documents the events and is both raw and profound, from explicit language of spit and sweat to poetry of love and loss.
Bass singer Pelham Andrews, backed by the men of the choir, has no trouble leading a threatening posse of vice squad officers, always the prime suspects in the killing yet never convicted.
Tenor Mark Oates is especially convincing as Duncan, the repressed homosexual who needed to wander the Torrens at night.
The opening night standing ovation was for Duncan and his “gruesome baptism in a bigoted hell” as much as for a taut and significant new Australian work.
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