At long last, the Sydney Festival under Wesley Enoch is starting to score runs

Sydney Festival under director Wesley Enoch features a critical mass of Aboriginal stories.

Chenoa Deemal and Aaron McGrath in Black Cockatoo. Picture: Prudence Upton

Wesley Enoch, whose fourth edition of the Sydney Festival started last week, is putting significant runs on the board with his program of indigenous stories, performers and ceremonies. More than in previous years, this festival has a critical mass of shows by indigenous artists in main-stage ­theatres and with high production values, and seems the fullest realisation to date of Enoch’s programming ethos.

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The cricket metaphor is appropriate because one of the festival highlights is Black Cockatoo, Geoffrey Atherden’s play about the 1868 Aboriginal cricket tour of England. Atherden juxtaposes ­episodes from the historic visit, with its overtones of paternalism and racism, and a contemporary discussion, set in a museum, about indigenous people having agency in the telling of their own stories. The cast, led by Aaron ­McGrath as Johnny Mullagh, deftly handles the play’s beguiling mixture of ­humour and seriousness.

Sydney Festival director Wesley Enoch. Picture: Sam Mooy

Black Cockatoo also marks Enoch’s overdue return to the stage as a director, and it is the first time he has directed a performance in one of his own Sydney Festivals. His most recent outings were before his tenure as festival director began in 2017: 2014’s play Black Diggers, about Aboriginal servicemen in World War I; and the revue I am Eora in 2012 that featured about 50 Aboriginal ­artists, including the legendary Wilma Reading.

Premieres of other indigenous works this year add visibility and substance to Enoch’s program — coming this week and next are the revival of Bran Nue Dae, produced by Opera Australia; the Gurrumul tribute concert, Bunggul; and Jane Harrison’s play about 1788, The Visitors.

Black Ties, one of the anticipated highlights of the opening weekend, is said to be the first major theatrical collaboration between indigenous Australian and New Zealand companies, Melbourne’s Ilbijerri and Auckland’s Te Rehia.

The comedy about the marriage of Aboriginal groom Kane (Mark Coles Smith) and Maori bride Hera (Tuakoi Ohia) is a trans-Tasman saga with a cast of 13, including an onstage band. The climax of the show is the riotous wedding reception, where all the family and cultural tensions established in the first act finally explode. Jack Charles is especially droll as the groom’s uncle, and doesn’t miss a beat when the wedding party descends into chaos.

In its scale and ambition, Black Ties is made for a festival setting and is staged — like last year’s multi-generational saga about a Sri Lankan family’s migration to Australia, S. Shakthidharan’s Counting and Cracking — in Sydney’s Town Hall. The play is a co-commission and would benefit from further development before its outing at other festivals, including Perth and Melbourne’s Asia TOPA performing arts festival.

The opening-night headliner was the Early Morning Opera company from Los Angeles with Joan Didion’s The White Album, a theatrical rendering of Didion’s essay about California and the 1960s counterculture. Central to the production, which ended on Sunday, is Mia Barron, who gives a tour-de-force performance as ­Didion. The long monologue that she delivers from memory, about 90 minutes in duration, brilliantly captures the author’s voice. The essay, and the stage version of it, is a first-person account of episodes including a recording session with the Doors, the fear and rumour that swept Los Angeles in the immediate aftermath of the Manson Family murders, the protests at San Francisco State University over Eurocentric study, and the trial of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton.

Joan Didion’s The White Album, featuring Mia Barron. Picture: Yaya Stempler

Such was the social ferment of the time, Barron as Didion says, that her sensations of nausea and vertigo seem the only appropriate response. (She undergoes a battery of medical tests and is later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.)

Barron is accompanied on stage by a cast of professional actors, and also a group of audience members who act as a kind of wordless Greek chorus, given their stage directions via headsets.

At a 15-minute “Quaker meeting” after the performance involving the cast and audience, much was made of the idealism of the 60s and today’s youth-led protests on issues such as climate ­action. It is difficult to reconcile, though, the civil rights and other achievements of the 60s with Didion’s testimony in The White Album, which depicts a society gripped by fear and narcissism.

Elsewhere in the festival, I particularly enjoyed the Sydney season of Laser Beak Man by Brisbane’s Dead Puppet Society, based on the character created by Tim Sharp, a young man with ­autism. An unconventional superhero, Laser Beak Man has a beak on his face and kindness in his heart, and saves the world with the help of his friend, the Black Sheep. The hyperkinetic puppetry and digital animations are accompanied by terrific songs by Sam Cromack and his band, Ball Park Music — one of several examples in this festival of theatre performances with live music.

The Sydney Festival continues to face considerable challenges to do with funding and venues, and these have an impact on the program. The festival is still without a principal sponsor and has had to recalibrate its finances accordingly. And Sydney’s chronic venue shortage will be even more acute next year after the Sydney Opera House closes the Concert Hall for a two-year refurbishment, and the City of Sydney evicts the Festival Garden from Hyde Park. Apart from Opera in the Domain, the festival has abandoned large-scale outdoor concerts in the middle of the city. These difficulties don’t help a festival that no longer commands the wide public profile it once enjoyed, and that has been eclipsed in popularity by the winter Vivid Sydney festival.

The Festival Garden already is reduced in scale from previous years and now features a single venue, the Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent, home to the acrobatic cabaret Life: The Show (including a new act involving a PVC cocoon), and the hugely energetic Josh Quong Tart in a revival of Reg Livermore’s classic creation, Betty Blokk-Buster.

Carriageworks has been transformed with Rebecca Baumann’s installation Radiant Flux, in which the windows and skylights have been coated with dichroic film, turning the venue into a giant kaleidoscope.

Other festival exhibitions there are Reko Rennie’s quietly assertive signboard Remember Me, and Daniel Boyd’s video installation of a constellation of blue and ochre dots. Kate Mitchell’s All Auras Touch is an evolving project in which categories of occupation are matched with “aura” photographs of individuals who do those jobs.

Also at Carriageworks is a helping of food and stories in ­Double Delicious, presented by Contemporary Asian Australian Performance. Five storytellers from Asian backgrounds — Chinese, Hong Konger, Indian, Korean and Filipino — take turns to tell the story of their family’s migration to Australia and the difficulties of adjusting to their new home.

Food preparation, and of course eating, is part of the experience, and people in the audience are served dishes described by each of the storytellers. Heather Jeong tells of her difficult relationship with her South Korean father, whose favourite meal was the one he remembered eating at US military camps: an unusual but surprisingly tasty soup of Spam, frankfurts and kim chi.

The withdrawal of French actress Isabelle Adjani and her production Opening Night, attributed to the bushfires, has left a dent in Enoch’s program, but the festival goes on without her.

Still to come are Archie Roach’s intimate concert Tell Me Why; Francois Chaignaud’s musical metamorphosis in Romances Inciertos, un Autre Orlando; English vocal ensemble Tenebrae; and the Sydney premieres of Australian shows Anthem, Colossus, and Time Flies, featuring the Flying Fruit Fly Circus.

The Sydney Festival continues until January 26.