Belvoir presents two plays by Alana Valentine and Caryl Churchill

By presenting two plays in repertory, with the same actors in each, Belvoir highlights historical dramas that speak to each other across time.

The cast of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, at Belvoir St Theatre. Picture: Teniola Komolafe

For the first time Belvoir is doing a repertory season of two plays on alternate nights with the same set and more or less the same cast.

Both are about “people who had a story and didn’t know how to tell it”, to quote Wayside Bride, and both are about visions of a fairer world in the context of political and religious oppression.

But the worlds they evoke couldn’t be more different.

Wayside Bride is set around the Wayside Chapel in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Alana Valentine’s play is based on interviews with people who were married by the legendary Reverend Ted Noffs, who ministered to outsiders of all kinds and battled with the Methodist Church which accused him of heresy. Apparently between 1964 and 1986, he married 24,000 couples from 132 nations.

Brandon McClelland as Ted Noffs and Marco Chiappi in Wayside Bride. Picture: Brett Boardman

In the stories told here the voices ring true, as they do in all of Valentine’s verbatim theatre work, but there is a personal dimension too.

Her mother Janice was married at the chapel and Alana appears as a character, going back in her imagination to the 1970s, in the guise of Janice, to interview the brides and other colourful Kings Cross identities. (“I’ve gone undercover in my own play!”) The result is extraordinarily moving and funny, and the cast is wonderful.

The play is as much about Ted Noffs and his wife Margaret as it is about the Wayside brides. Played by Brandon McClelland and Sacha Horler, they are an awesome couple. This is a tribute to their work and legacy as well as a celebration of those 48,000 outsiders.

It ends with a passionate speech by the Alana character and a delightful final wedding, such as Ted never got to do but certainly would have if he could.

Rebecca Massey in Wayside Bride. Picture: Brett Boardman

There are splendid performances by Maggie Blinco, Rebecca Massey and Marco Chiappi but all the cast, which also includes Arkia Ashraf, Rashidi Edward, Emily Goddard, Sandy Greenwood and Angeline Penrith, are bursting with energy and skill.

Except for Blinco and Horler, the same actors appear in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, by the great Caryl Churchill.

This powerfully absorbing play covers the first 10 years of the English Civil War in the mid-17th century, when radicals joined the revolution against Charles I, fought for political and religious freedom and lost out to the increasingly tyrannical Oliver Cromwell.

Centred around a great long scene dramatising the Putney Debates, concerning universal (male) suffrage and the radicals’ hopes for parliamentary democracy, it also includes some powerful scenes in which the poor are given a voice. They are caught up in the turmoil of religious fervour, warfare and oppression. Their passionate belief that Christ will return in 1650 is increasingly sad as it becomes obvious that whatever this war is about it isn’t about any kind of freedom for them. “Now the army is as great a tyrant as the King was,” says one. The wheel turns.

Massey in Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Picture: Teniola Komolafe

The parallels with many modern conflicts were obvious in 1976, when the play first appeared, and are even more obvious now.

In the hands of co-directors Eamon Flack and Hannah Goodwin the upheavals of religious and political populism, the greed of autocratic leaders and the suffering of their populations are, in this old play about a past time, strikingly topical.

The open set design by Michael Hankin includes an imposing Welcome sign for Wayside Bride – which sums up Noffs’ whole approach – and uses graffiti on the walls to good effect for Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. It is lit by Damien Cooper, with costumes by Ella Butler and a sound design and composition by Alyx Dennison that, especially in the Churchill play, movingly supports the people’s dreams.

These plays have been put together for a reason – they talk to each other over the years. They should be seen together.

Wayside Bride by Alana Valentine. Light Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill.In repertory at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney. Tickets: $48-$91. Bookings: online. Season until May 29.