The Whisper

An indigenous family, Nan (Melodie Reynolds-Diarra), elder grandson Jack (Balla Neba) and younger grandson Riley (the playwright Brodie Murray) travel mostly by night, evading the police and making their way south, fleeing South Australia and heading for the (relative) safety of Swan Hill in Victoria.  It’s around 1946-47 and the police are not just taking children away, they’re bullying, harassing and arresting Aboriginal people. 

Nan is always hyper-alert, on edge, tense and irritable, the family’s leader and protector.  Happy-go-lucky Jack has exacerbated things by carrying on with a white girl and wants to be with her.  He might very well love her and pine for her, but Nan tells him sternly that’s too bad; he must not go back to her.  Is he mad?

Soon her son Pop Ray (Greg Fryer), an ex-serviceman, just back from the war, father of Jack and Riley, finds them and joins the horse and dray caravan.  His war service won’t cut any ice with the cops.  Fryer brings a dignity and calm fatalism to the role, a foil to Nan’s anxious aggression.  Her anxiety is absolutely understandable, but the script rather boxes Reynolds-Diarra in and Nan becomes a bit of a one-note termagant.

As with his earlier – and excellent - Soul of Possum from 2021, Brodie Murray bases his play on the stories and experiences of his family and ancestors, but here the source material is much more recent and perhaps sacrosanct.  He interviewed the real Nan in 2022 and her stories of the family’s flight are the basis of the play.  She shepherded thirteen children – as we learn from Murray’s father before the play begins – but that proving impossible, the burden falls on the younger Riley to represent the fear, bewilderment and painful realisations of their lives – and places more emphasis on the relationship of the brothers. 

Murray seems to me to’ve been constrained by the ‘true story’ and by reverence for Nan, an heroic figure in the family.  But with a cast of four (Greg Fryer doubles as the police nemesis in silhouette) and a stationary dray on stage, with no sense of movement, the story of this epic journey does become repetitious – despite Shane Grant’s lighting creating the passage of time.  A noise in the bush, a warning, and the family must pack up and get on the track again – fast.  The jeopardy brought about by Jack’s love affair happens off-stage – the girl and our characters’ complicated relationship with her family is all in rather rushed exposition.

The complex, multi-facetted Soul of Possum showed the influence of Murray’s mentor Declan Furber Gillick – which Murray readily acknowledged.  Here, there were three dramaturgs – Glenn Shea, Mari Lourey and director Maryanne Sam – but The Whisper – due to a variety of constraints, including the nature of the story itself – does not rise to the same heights. At a bare forty-five minutes it ends with so much more that it might have said.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Emma Salmon