As an actor, Margaret Harvey is one of the living icons of the Australian stage. Her star turn as the eponymous Black Medea in Wesley Enoch’s 2005 production remains scorched into the local theatre memory in bleach-haired, red-dressed fury.
My Lover’s Bones, at the Footscray Community Arts theatre, also features Harvey as a performer, but it’s her talents as a theatre maker of diverse practice that impress. Brown Cab, the company she founded with her brother John, have made the show with Harvey as director and co-devisor. And it delivers a menacing, aesthetically-rich theatrical experience well worth the trip out to Footscray to see.
Harvey and her brother are of Indigenous heritage and My Lover’s Bones adapts contemporary Aboriginal writer Cameron Costello’s poem The Bunyip of Bummiera as a hybrid theatre-dance work. Presented here is no fluffy pink TV show bunyip but the visceral, terrifying monster of ancient legend, a creature that stirs underneath black consciousness so powerfully that early white Australian colonisers became convinced it was responsible for settler disappearances.
Here, though, the Bunyip’s quarry is a modern Indigenous man, performed by Kirk Page. Scraps of text suggest Page’s character is haunted by an act of violence, and the consequences conjured by his restless conscience take the form of a creature that stalks both his inner world and the urban streets he inhabits.
An accomplished sound design works with Kirk’s energetic performance to build an atmosphere of terror as the indivisibility of the hunter and hunted twists and shifts through Page’s very physical wrestle with panic. Glorious touches of stagecraft, like a storm of newsprint and Harvey’s ghostly materialisations, enhance very simple storytelling. It only runs to 40 minutes but delivers thrills for its duration.
One of the show’s powerful recommendations is how neatly it eschews the established cliches of Australian black theatre. Presented here are black artists making a show from an Aboriginal source text with precise craft and artistic originality. It’s sophisticated as well as entertaining, and a showcase of an artistic team at the top of their game.
• My Lover’s Bones runs at Footscray Community Arts Centre until 18 October
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