Wittenoom by Mary-Anne Butler
At Red Stitch Theatre, St Kilda, until 19 Feb 2023
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars:***1/2
This review is published only on this blog. I’ll also review it on Art Weekly on 3MBS on 25 Feb 2023.
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Wittenoom is a tragedy about a mother and daughter, a town and a community all damaged by an asbestos mine in the Pilbara. Mary Anne Butler’s play, directed deftly and imaginatively by Susie Dee, interweaves twin narratives about these two women, set years apart and expressed in totally different styles.
One is a lively, vigorous, often funny, episodic dialogue and self-narration between Dot (Caroline Lee) and Pearl (Emily Goddard), her 15-year-old daughter, as they negotiate their relationship in Wittenoom, a remote asbestos mining town. The second story portrays the pair at an unspecified time after they leave Wittenoom, after Dot receives her diagnosis of Mesothelioma, a terminal and untreatable illness caused by exposure to asbestos.
Butler’s spare, evocative poetic language elevates Dot and Pearl’s reactions to Dot’s medical condition, and the stillness, the performers’ direct address to the audience and the atmospheric lighting (Rachel Burke) intensify the impact.
In contrast, the interactions earlier in their lives in Wittenoom have a lightness, playfulness and muscularity in the language and performance. Dot talks about her lusty life pursuing, then disposing of a parade of men, her work in the miners’ mess and the pub, then her choice to take in boarders in their house. Her decision to move her young daughter to a remote community where she could earn good money, seems positive but leads to disaster for both of them.
Lee is compelling, audacious, energetic as the hard-bitten Dot who struggles to accept her impending death. Goddard captures the maturing of Pearl as she grows from teenage tearaway school dropout to a political activist, mobilising the miners to fight for safer conditions and better information about the risk of their environment.
The set design (Dann Barber) echoes those battered, abandoned, old billboards that appear on roadsides in the outback. This wooden framework provides a backdrop for Dot and Pearl’s dialogue as well as a physical framework that they can walk around, lean on, climb up, perch on, or disappear behind into the murky, dim recesses, while the insidious film of pale dust, the hazy atmosphere and crumbled wattle sprigs express the dusty, dying outback location.
Wittenoom is intense, densely written, funny and painful and it tells a powerful yet intimate tale.
by Kate Herbert
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| Wittenoom- Caroline Lee (L), Emily Goddard- Credit Jodie Hutchinson |
This play was developed through Red Stitch’s INK program.
CAST
Emily Goddard - Pearl
Caroline Lee - Dot
CREATIVES
Susie Dee - Director & Dramaturg
Dann Barber - Set & Costume Design
Rachel Burke - Lighting Design
Ian Moorhead - Composition/Sound Design
Cassandra Fumi - Assistant Director
Spencer Herd - Assistant Lighting Design
Olga Makeeva - Costume Maker
PRODUCTION
David Bowyer - Production Manager
Cassandra Fumi - Stage Manager/ Assistant Director
Georgina Bright - Deputy Stage Manager
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