The Secret River brings the secrets back home

Their settlers’ laws undid indigenous culture; now the British can reflect on their culpability and responsibility.

Major ‘Moogy’ Sumner as Dharug elder Yalamundi in The Secret River at the Edinburgh Festival. Picture: Ryan Buchanan

Shaka Cook knew within minutes that his Edinburgh audience had a sense of humour. Early in the groundbreaking Edinburgh Festival premiere of The Secret River on the weekend, there was a loud ripple of laughter as William Thornhill, the former convict, described his ticket-of-leave interview with Sydney governor Lachlan Macquarie as being unintelligible because he “is a Scot”.

Says Cook, who plays Ngalamalum: “In Australia that line tends to pass by without any reaction from Australian audiences. But here it was great because they defin­itely understood the play, and on stage it was like, ‘yep, sweet, no worries’, and the energy levels immediately rose.”

For the first time, and to great acclaim from critics, Andrew Bovel­l’s adaptation of the 2005 book by Kate Grenville is being performed this week to audiences outside Australia. At the prestig­ious Edinburgh Festival, where the ancient streets heave with Americans and Europeans, the Dharug language is being heard for the first time as well. Then, later this month, the play transfers to London for a ­season at the National Theatre.

The play’s central theme, which shines a light on the conflict of early settlers with Aborigines, raises uncomfortable questions among the British about their own culpability and responsibility.

When the 22-strong cast and crew arrived last week in Scotland, they performed a traditional Aboriginal smoking ceremony. And on Saturday, after the three-hour opening-night performance, the cast received a standing ovation.

It is difficult for any show to stand out among the many hund­reds of performances during the Edinburgh Festival and its associated Fringe Festival, but The Secret River and its dark storylines — a Dharug woman in chains, uneasy relationships, a mass slaughter — has achieved this distinction.

Having the original characters speak in the Dharug dialect, dragging mud through the floor and splashing the front-row audience, with water added authenticity to the communication struggles that are central to the play. The reviews for the production, directed by Neil Armfield, were overwhelmingly positive.

What’s On Stage magazine gave the show four stars, saying: “A mammoth production that takes a small family story and projects it on to a narrative of nations.”

According to The Edinburgh Reporter, it was “a shattering, astonishi­ngly beautiful piece of contemporary theatre, one that speaks directly to a modern world riven by mistrust of the other”. The influential national dailies were glowing, too. The Daily Telegraph gave it five stars, with critic Dominic Cavendish raving: “It’s unforgettable and frankly — given our ongoing need to look at the legacy of empire — unmissable.”

In The Times, Ann Treneman said the story was guided with “great flow and deep currents” by Armfield: “This epic story from Australia’s brutal past seems familiar and strange.”

In The Guardian, Michael Billing­ton wrote that Bovell and Armfield combined “masterly story­telling with metaphorical resonance” in a multi-layered productio­n. “It is a work,” he writes, “that takes its time but memorably and movingly pinpoints a crucial moment in Australian history, while suggesting that we are witnessing a re-enactment of an unending colonial tragedy.”

Some of the lines of the play resonate with Australia’s national discussion about a proposed First Nations acknowledgment in the Constitution, even if this issue does not necessarily have the same connotations with British audi­ences. But other aspects of identity and conflict in this part of Britain that has long battled for independ­ence, and the broader national crisis over Brexit, most certainly do.

Thornhill, played by Nathaniel Dean, tells a local Aboriginal family­ as he begins to farm the land with corn, “this is my place now, you have all the rest” — all the while prodding Dharug elder Yalamundi (Major “Moogy” Sumner) with a shovel. Thornhill admonishes his son for playing with the Dharug children, yet one assists his wife during a difficult birth and they trade bark coolamons for clothes before tensions escalate.

Courtesy of The Secret River, these stories about Aboriginal relations­hips with European settlers are being given unusual­ prominence in Britain. Ningali Lawford-Wolf, who plays Dhirrumbin, has her face plastered all over Edinburgh bus stops and on the London Tube, with the play scheduled to open at the National Theatre on August 22.

Twenty-eight-year-old Cook, born in the Pilbara, is excited that an Aboriginal story is being dis­cussed in the shadows of the Edinburgh Castle and is soon to appear in the back yard where the petty thief Thornhill was born.

Cook is one of the most vibrant actors on The Secret River’s stage, showcasing his mastery of Dharug as well as playing the double bass on stage. This is his first trip outside­ Australia, but it almost didn’t happen. Cook, who starred in The Secret River’s original prod­uction at the Sydney Theatre Company, almost gave up acting following the death of his mother, Masie Pat, 18 months ago.

He was overwhelmed with grief but pushed through to finish his first feature film, The Flood, which is due out next March — and also to continue working on the stage.

“My mum had always told me the stories,” he says. “She lived on reserves and she was eight before she had any electricity and a flushing toilet.

“That Australian history is not that far away, and we know how recent it is. But this is a story where Aboriginal people are not victims, they haven’t had their dignit­y, pride or respect taken away, and that is very important.”

It has taken years since the ­Sydney premiere of The Secret River, in 2013, for this British tour to become a reality. For Bovell, transporting the play to Britain has raised questions about the country’s role in modern Australian history.

“Australia is a long way away,” he says. “It is very difficult to take our stories elsewhere, but here it’s particularly important to the UK because it was this nation’s laws that sent those people to that continent. They were British people, rejected and unwanted by this ­nation, and out of that we forged a nation, partly.

“It was under British laws that a number of massacres took place around Sydney. I don’t think we have had much of a dialogue between­ us about what that is.”

Bovell says the production challenges local audiences, including those who still felt interactions between settlers and Abor­iginal people had little to do with contemporary concerns.

“Those are really ignorant views,” he says, saying the show “gives the British a great insight into what is important about Australia, Aust­ralia’s history and the kind of history that Australia has come out of”.

Bovell says he is “slightly nervous­” about the reaction from seasoned theatregoers in London when the production transfers to the National. Armfield, though, has becom­e a familiar figure for British audiences since his 2001 prod­uction of Cloudstreet.

“At the moment, Britain is very inward-looking because of Brexit,” Bovell says.

“They are so preoccupied with their own place in the world and are so uncertain about that. Are they going to have the capacity to open themselves out to a story that comes from so far away and yet they are so culturally connected to? Are they going to see that connection between our two peoples and countries and want to talk about that?”

Its season at the National Theatre will ensure a prominent reception for The Secret River in London: “It’s where the best theatre happens on a scale other companies can’t deliver, and the fact that the National invited this company to perform is really significant­.”

Cook says the audience will discover­ that the play’s emotional rhythm is “action, action, action, take a breath, cry”. Maybe a true impact of the play will be whether British tears are shed as well.