Barbara and The Camp Dogs

Disarming in its unpretentious frankness, Barbara and The Camp Dogs will make you laugh and have you cry.  It is bold, brassy, engagingly moving theatre with great songs.  It is just tremendous.

Having sold out in Sydney it is surely set to sell out in Melbourne.

The Merlyn is transformed into an old style pub – music venue by designer Stephen Curtis.  This creates a vital, comfortable environment and reduces the distance between performers and audience.  Some of the audience double as pub clientele on bar stools around elevated tables.  The set, with the help of ‘state of the art’ lighting by Karin Norris, is turned into various environments and even a hospital.

Musically, initially somewhat garish, generally toe tapping rock and roll, mellows as the emotional content of the story becomes more complex.  The, often catchy, songs are written by Alana Valentine, Ursula Yovich and Adam Ventour.  The singing in character by Ursula Yovich, Elaine Crombie and Troy Brady is just glorious and ‘The Camp Dogs’ are fabulous musicians.

Ursula Yovich is a great little actor and stunning singer.  She brings us her ‘alter ego’ - a small, energetic feisty ‘very rough diamond’ - Barbara.  Abandoned by her mother Barbara grew up in her Auntie’s house with her cousin Rene, played exquisitely by Elaine Crombie.  So they became sisters, experiencing all the intimacy, edgy competitiveness and unconditional love implicit in spending their childhoods together and sharing a Mum. 

Throughout the evening Barbara and Rene have some wicked intimate conversations - deriding each other with excruciating personal references.  This is hysterical, crude, confronting and candid – but also endearing. 

The story is about these two women, particularly in relation to the sanctity of their relationship to each other and their aboriginality.  They are both endearing optimistic characters - albeit a little jaded.  But life is catching up with them and sadly their mother is failing and they need to get to her bedside.  She is very ill. 

Barbara and The Camp Dogs is about some of the most messy aspects of being human, such as - family, abandonment, forgiveness, the search for love, the perplexity of meeting or not meeting expectations and of the profoundly rupturing disorientation of grief and loss. 

We hang out in Sydney with Barbara and Rene and then travel to Darwin and to Catherine and back – a long journey, particularly on a motorbike.  Around the middle of the evening there seems to be some unnecessary purposeless meandering around the performance space.  It feels like director Leticia Caceres has not fully reigned in the content or cast.  But hey this fluidity could be indicative of particularly collaborative relationships all round.  I do feel there are times when the staging calls out for stillness and focus and the text some editing - for maximum impact.  However these are small quibbles because, the culminating upshot of the whole experience, is just tremendous.

Suzanne Sandow   

BUY THE SCRIPT HERE.

Photographer: Brett Boardman.

Credits

Director – Leticia Caceres

Cast:  Troy Brady, Elaine Crombie and Ursula Yovich

Set Design – Stephen Curtis

Costume Design – Chloe Greaves

Lighting Design – Karen Norris

Sound Design – Steve Toulmin

Musicians:  Sorcha Albuquerque, Jessica Dunn and Michelle Vincent