THEATRE
Produced & designed by Geraldine Cook-Dafner & Naomi Edwards
Part of La Mama re-opening War-rak/Banksia Festival
At La Mama, Sat 11 December 2021 at 8.30am & live streamed
Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3t-RoI-u3Ie
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars: ****
Dispatches from the Frontline is an evocative and resonant reading by Geraldine Cook-Dafner of excerpts from the diary of a Victorian nurse, Sister Nan Reay, who served for four gruelling years on the frontline of the battlefields of World War One.
With just her voice and gentle, magnetic presence, Cook-Dafner transports the audience –both live at La Mama and live streamed to our homes – to the Front in France and the field hospitals in which the medical staff from Australia and other countries struggle day after day and year after year, to repair the damaged bodies and spirits of the soldiers. Many cannot be saved or restored. Projected images provide haunting echoes of the war.
Seeing this piece, directed with a deft but light hand by Naomi Edwards, in the newly re-opened La Mama, performed in from of the La Mama fireplace and dark red brick was already intensely emotional, but it is deeply affecting to hear Cook-Dafner enlivening the words of Sister Nan Reay and painting pictures of the horrors of war, appalling injuries and pointless loss of life.
Nan wonders repeatedly what the point is of such senseless war. Her quiet insights resonate with our own experience of global conflict and of a global pandemic that has touched all our lives and her tenacity and courage are reminder of our gratitude to our own, tireless and selfless health workers.
Dispatches from the Frontline is a vivid provocative, challenging and profoundly emotional experience made even more poignant because these are the words of a real, Australian woman living and working as a nurse 100 years ago.
Watch the performance on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3t-RoI-u3Ie
by Kate Herbert
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