A Nest of Skunks

A Nest of Skunks
By James Balian and Roger Vickery. Collaborations Theatre. The Depot Theatre, Marrickville, NSW Aug 3 – 13, 2016.

This current show at the Depot Theatre in Sydney’s inner west echoes the sort of multicultural stories the respected company Sidetrack used to explore in the same theatre decades ago.  But this tale about hiding asylum seekers paints a far darker, dystopian picture of Australia today.

A short thriller set in a suburban safe house, this is a secretive world of surveillance and high penalties for anyone found housing escaped refugees. And so they work and whisper in volunteer cells deliberately having no knowledge of their comrades in other cells. 

Michael (Peter Condon) and Lily (Penelope Lee) run such a house, with refugees Stephen (Brendan Miles) and his daughter Sam (Aanisa Vylet) hiding in the pantry.  It’s safer if even the operatives call the refugees, skunks, as all good Australians now do.

Jeannie Gee is the suspicious neighbour and Amanda Maple-Brown is Kristy, who inexplicably is both a government and cell operative. 

Writers James Balian and Roger Vickery give some nuanced drama to these relationships, but silences sag and tensions slide with this cast directed by Travis Green.  We get to know little about these characters, although Stephen’s lies and final desperate truth provide the play’s moving end.  

Oddly, Miles is an Anglo-Australian actor, with a good line in broken English but playing no specific national origin.  He’s an Everyman Refugee, perhaps deliberately, but this suspends our empathy. The vision of an authoritarian Australia, although dramatically promising – and even politically possible - is never quite fleshed into reality.

Martin Portus

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