Some Secrets Should Be Kept Secret

On a remote outback farm, an old woman dies.  Three letters are sent to three siblings: they must come ‘home’ for their inheritance.  The homecoming of scattered family members is a familiar trope.  But here, first, there’s an eerie note as the Storyteller (Glenn Shea himself) teaches the cast a sweet, melodious little song in language, and blows red and yellow ochre dusts over their heads.  Sound designer Elissa Goodrich gives us the screech of hawks overhead.  That Shea chooses to begin his story this way and introduce his characters in the fresh open air, in daylight, on the La Mama HQ forecourt is nice theatrical decision because what follows, inside, in the theatre itself, will become very dark indeed.

One sibling, Peter (Corey Saylor-Brunskill), the eldest, a dark, angry and weathered man, screws up his letter.  But the other two, Camille (Maggie Church-Kopp) and Matthew (Brodie Murray) are driving there together.  Despite their very different present lives, Camille and Matthew are still bonded from childhood, and he relies on her – almost as if she is his protector.  He’s a nervous, jumpy gay man – married but adrift without his husband.  Camille (family nickname ‘Camel’) has built herself tough character armour - is apparently cynical, a case-hardened S&M ‘mistress’ who relishes her power.  Meanwhile Peter, despite his visceral resistance toward this reunion, reluctantly catches a train – on which Nicole Nabout and Syd Brisbane play delightful little cameos as railway staff. 

When we enter the theatre, we find that Meg White’s set is dark, with shabby last century furniture, some covered in sheets, dull landscape paintings, and, we imagine, dust that is never disturbed.  It is low-level squattocracy gone to seed.  Gina Gascoigne’s lighting plunges the characters and the audience into the gloom of a subterranean cavern.  Some family retainers remain: Margie (Nabout) the bustling, cheerful housekeeper, and yardman roustabout Michael (Brisbane).

There is some slight confusion here: Nabout is too young for the role, and Brisbane appears to slip between multiple roles, but, in any case, our focus is on the siblings.

They are not blood relatives; they are survivors of the Stolen Generation, adopted as children into the silence and fear of this gloomy house. 

What follows is increasingly disturbing, increasingly Gothic, and yet real.  That is to say, what happened in these characters’ past could happen and did happen.  By heightening the pain and exploitation to hyper-melodrama Shea and his cast reveal secrets that are horrifying and compelling.  We see nothing, we only hear – so we imagine – in vivid images.  Rape, child abuse, murder – and guilt, overwhelming guilt.

To play these roles and at such a melodramatic pitch places a great burden on this cast and at times the heightened reality escapes them.  Only Saylor-Brunskill, his character sustained by rage, meets the challenge.  But this will improve over the run.   

As Faulkner said, ‘The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.’  And that is very much the burden of Shea’s play.  Each of his characters has a past – a past that they don’t want to remember. secrets that they would rather not acknowledge or reveal.  But the lines between past and present are clear to us.  And yet Shea contradicts the ironic title of his play.  What he dramatizes is that Some Secrets Should Not Be Kept Secret.  They must be dragged into the light, faced, and acknowledged. 

As he says in a writer/director’s statement, his characters live under layers of trauma.  We see that on their faces as they remember.  Camille in denial, Matthew timid and anxious, and Peter forever poisoned by the knowledge of what he didn’t do and the knowledge that he cannot change the past now.  The play, says Shea, is about the ‘characters’ journey to where they need to be and what they need to do.’

Some Secrets is the third and ‘final chapter of an indigenous trilogy’ – the first, the much-awarded Three Magpies Perched in a Tree; the second, Masterpiece; and now Some Secrets.  For me, Secrets, despite its content, does not quite have the curiously resonant strength of Magpies and Masterpiece.  By opting for explicit horror in the Gothic mode, it’s almost as if Shea distracts and puzzles us, paradoxically weakening his case.  Even so, Some Secrets is a masterful work that will leave you shaken – and thinking.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill