The Sugar House

Alana Valentine is best known as a verbatim playwright giving voice to diverse communities and the challenges and sometimes horrors they’ve endured. 

The Sugar House similarly has a sharp sense of place; set in Sydney’s once working class suburb of Pyrmont, around the then iconic CSR factory, if now dominated by a casino and washed clean by new gentrification.

Yet Valentine has delivered a more personally charged play, spanning three generations, and drawing less on community research and more on her own family memories – creating battlers which Sarah Goodes’ excellent cast makes flesh and blood.

Kris McQuade dominates as June, the earthy matriarch of a grandmother, carelessly critical of her unhappy daughter, which is a curiously underwritten role but fired with resentment by Sacha Horler.  Sheridan Harbridge avoids her mum but under Granny’s tough love ages nicely as Narelle, from a curious eight year old in the 1960s to an educated activist turned lawyer.

June’s petty criminal relatives, including her flash son (Josh McConville) and his patient wife (Nikki Shiels), and the injustices served by corrupt local police, inspire in June and then Narelle a long campaign against the death sentence.  Lex Marinos plays a range of roles with a quiet truth.

Yet this political theme is largely tangential to the play’s main character as a family saga in a place pulled between working class values and smart cafes.

Michael Hankin’s unchanging warehouse apartment set of big windows and old pillars is perfect when the older Narelle sneaks past the real estate agent to sniff her past, but contributes less to the retrospective family storytelling which follows.

The play is overwritten, blunting the narrative drive around these three generations of women.  But these are real people, tender and warm-witted, and they stay with you in the dark.

Martin Portus

Read and buy the script here.

Photographer: Brett Boardman.