Standing, stripped to the waist, under the harsh burn of the house-lights, head shaved clean and one eye a sickly milky-white, Paul Case leaps furiously into this darkly comic story of New South Wales in the late 18th century telling the Story of Robert, Joseph and Billy, a trio of convicts who happen upon an idea to make some money but are confronted by the vast and incomprehensible horror of the untamed continent and their pitiful smallness within it.
It’s simply enough staged, and the burning lights of the venue suffuse the entire experience with a sense of the blazing sun and oppressive atmosphere. Yet it is a piece which would perhaps benefit from a few atmospheric light changes, as the tale wends through plain and forest, day and night. That said, Case is a charismatic host and storyteller, with a physicality that feels like a coiled spring and an easy glide from accent to accent as he switches tone and character. The choice to write the play in period dialect is one which adds some extra flavour but is crafted and enacted well enough that no-one is ever left confused.
There is, however, a slight miss in the tone, as the few early jokes and off the cuff lines that elicited a giggle here and there felt self-consciously received, and it was not until the blackly comedic middle of the play that several people began to chortle in earnest at what was clearly supposed to be gallows humour of the bleakest kind. But the twisting tale still turns its serpentine horror through grim threat, bloody gore and vile acts on the way towards nightmarish catastrophe.
It’s an evocative and bloodily marvellous piece of new theatre, steeped in a specifically outback form of folk-horror, that harks back upon a cruel and vile period in British colonial history. A fine piece of theatre, which deserves a look.