The Drover’s Wife

Leah Purcell here ambitiously reworks Henry Lawson’s famous 1893 short story about the drover’s wife left alone in the Alpine country to fend for her children.  The biggest action in Lawson’s yarn was the snake in the woodpile; Purcell paints a far broader canvas.

She’s created a gripping kind of Australian Western, one both tender and horrifically violent, an uncompromising story on the brutal ways this unforgiving settler life treated its women and the Aborigines.  You can see why she credits Quentin Tarantino’s film, Django Unchained.

An innocent black on the run from the troopers, Yadaka (a compelling Mark Coles Smith) arrives and slowly builds an empathy with the wary drover’s wife and her teenage son (Will McDonald). 

Racial differences blur and Purcell, who’s perfect playing her own resilient heroine, delivers a final story twist which is profound and almost hopeful.  But it’s a bloody, casually violent voyage to get there, with some malevolent, unwelcome visitors, played notably by Benedict Hardie and Tony Cogin.

Across Stephen Curtis’ expansive ash-strewn floor (with just the basics of camp living and a fallen tree), the play’s choreography – and especially the fights – are sometimes tentative and under-directed.  Dramatic action also drains away when Purcell’s two protagonists slip into a story telling exposition, inherent perhaps in Lawson’s original yarn.

But when the horrors re-claim the story, driven by a haunting soundscape from The Sweats, this is a landmark, passionate play about people we care for and urgent themes reaching from now to that Alpine landscape of our past.  And taking us there, directed by Leticia Caceres, you can almost smell Tess Schofield’s motley mix of historic costumes. 

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman

PREVIEW AND BUY THE SCRIPT HERE.