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 Q Station, North Head, Manly
Bookings: (02) 9976 6220
What a spot! I’m looking out over Port Jackson from the one-time quarantine station at North Head and I’m feeling just that little bit special as I sip bubbly and enjoy this unspoilt inlet at the gateway of our beautiful harbour.
I’m a sucker for site specific theatre and someone has decided to attract tourists and locals alike to this fragile headland by creating a multimedia show that draws on the history of the site, if not the Aboriginal history, and while I might not see any ghosts (526 people died here between 1828 and 1984), I will leave intrigued about a remarkable part of our history that never made it into my high school textbooks.
I’m revelling in the rough-edged isolationism, only a few miles from a shoreline heaving with dwellings, but I don’t want to forget that for the many interred here those southern lights represented their former lives and hearty health. It is the ambitious task of this project, not only to engage us with the historical significance of the site but also to allow us to be inspired by the real stories of those who lived and died here.
Unfortunately at the moment the location outclasses the show. Defiance struggles because the execution is not as strong as the idea. Despite the ensemble of talented actors and designers the show is let down by the script.
Carlton Lamb and Jamie Jackson have perhaps been set the task of writing something that is all things to all people – well after all the site is a tourist attraction – but too often the script only manages to be dryly informative or it gets bogged down in melodrama and excessive pathos. At those times I noticed the audience starting to fidget and look around because staring at the wall was far more interesting than anything else going on.
Yet occasionally there are glimpses of the emotional journey the work might be, especially in the character monologues that allow us to feel the weight of the experience these people endured.
Rebekah Moore, Lucy Miller, Damien Rice and Berynn Schwerdt are all excellent, convincingly playing eight or so roles each. I should mention how the well-honed craft of these performers delivers to the audience an aural history of this city they might not have been expecting as the actors effortlessly switch accents as well as characters.
I still count this journey as a positive experience and will be interested to hear how this ongoing work develops.
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