Blood Sister
by Daniel Keene at Trades Hall until September
26, 1999
Reviewer: Kate
Herbert
The poor old Kelly
clan was an unhappy one. Ned hanged, Dan burned, Mum gaoled and sister Kate
drowned. There is nothing glamorous about their lives.
Daniel Keene has revamped his play, Blood Sister, written in
1989, for this production directed by Tim Maddock who directed Keene's play, The
Architect's Walk for The Adelaide Festival last year. The show has unobtrusive
lighting by Shane Grant and a simple design by Kari Morseth.
Blood Sister, written for four women, (Rhonda Wilson, Laura
Lattuada, Josephine Fisher, Maryanne Sam) is a grim story constructed around
Kate Kelly's "rest cure" in a sanatorium 20 years after her brother's
hanging.
Kate (Wilson) is a drunk, an opium addict and a depressive
who drifts in and out of reality and distorted dreams or memories of her lost
childhood and her damned family.
The three other women act as a chorus in the style of the
ancient Greek theatre. They chant, sing Irish ballads, ululate and wail in
semi-darkness, speaking in verse, a mode that is one of Keene's trademarks.
As chorus, they criticise, support or taunt Kate in her
delicate state
His dialogue shifts between the realistic and the poetic.
These two styles are distinctive in all of Keene's writing but it is generally
the gritty realism that is the more successful dramatically. This was the case
in many most of the short plays in the Keene-Taylor Project.
The women play characters from Kate's life. Her sister
Maggie (Fisher) appears in a dream, obsessed with death. A sanctimonious worker
tries to support and advise her in the sanatorium (Sam).
The play remains distinctly humourless throughout, lacking
the rollicking Irish humour one might expect, even in deep sadness. The
exception is the scenes involving Kate's fellow drunken sanatorium inmate,
played with comic relish by Lattuada.
Blood Sister provides us with a good deal of information
about Kat and the Kelly gang, particularly the siege at Glenrowan at which Ned
was captured and Dan burned to death. Kate was a witness to these horrors and
spent the rest of her life trying to escape them. In the late 20th century, she
would be treated for post-traumatic stress.
She rebuilt her life, marrying and living with husband and
children in Forbes until an actress in a travelling show, called "The True
History of the Kelly Gang," recognised her, leading to Kate being hounded
by her new community. Is it any wonder she wanted to kill herself?
by Kate Herbert for 2 pages
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