Stolen review: Story of forced removal of Indigenous children remains powerful

STOLEN

Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, June 3. Until June 17

Stolen is the second production by the National Theatre of Parramatta. Credit: Amanda James

★★★

First produced in 1998, a year after the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Bringing Them Home report was released, and a full decade before we got around to an apology, Jane Harrison's Stolen retains its power to move and enlighten us on the subject of the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families.

To illuminate the plight of thousands, Harrison weaves elements of the stories of many into the fractured narratives of three women and two men in vignettes spanning childhood to adulthood.

Ruby (played by Berthalia Selina Reuben) is an emotionally and sexually abused inmate of a children's home, crushed by the weight of the terrible secret she keeps.

Jimmy (Mathew Cooper) was taken as a toddler and made to believe his mother was dead. Like Ruby, he suffers terribly. Later in life, when the lie is exposed, Jimmy's pain intensifies to the point where it becomes unbearable.

Shirley (Henrietta Baird) is haunted by the image of her distraught mother, framed in the back window of the car that took her to the welfare home. Sandy (Kerri Simpson) is a drifter, his life's direction set early by a mother forced to shunt him between houses to hide him from welfare inspectors.

For Ann (Matilda Brown), the story is somewhat different. Adopted by a middle-class white family, she lives a relatively untroubled life, wondering perhaps if her dark skin might mean she's South American. When she learns of her true heritage and meets her real family, she is shocked by their poverty.

Vicki Van Hout​ directs this National Theatre of Parramatta production, the second in the new company's inaugural season. Van Hout is better known as a choreographer and contemporary performance maker and her production, as you might expect, is strikingly physical at times with trauma described in surprising or at least unusual ways.

Sandy's "can of peas" story, in which he explains how he developed his hatred for them, begins as a game of thimblerig. Ruby's abuse and Jimmy's punch-up with small town racists become violent dances. At one point, Jimmy speaks from beneath a pile of torn cardboard. A malevolent Dreamtime spirit, the Mungee, is made flesh in a tower of writhing bodies.

Dominated by a tree-like installation wrapped in colourful woollen knits (Van Hout has co-designed this show with Imogen Ross), and moodily lit by Toby Knyvett, the stage can seem like a surreal playground.

Broadly speaking, this is an arresting piece of theatremaking with an experimental edge to it.

But more focus needs to be directed to Harrison's text. Variations in performance intensity and volume, and the split focus between speech and movement, make these voices less available to us than they should be, particularly when sound designer and composer Phil Downing's work comes into play, or for those seated more than halfway back in the deceptively large Lennox Theatre.