The Drover’s Wife feels completely at home on the Joan Sutherland Theatre stage.
Leah Purcell’s Molly Johnson remains a formidable presence throughout: a woman surviving the brutality of the Australian bush, protecting her children and navigating a world shaped by violence, racism and increasingly complicated questions about her own identity. The performances across the company allow us to connect deeply with Molly’s struggle without ever reducing her to someone whose struggle we should pity. Whatever is taken from her, her strength remains her defining quality.
And this production gives that story an extraordinary physical world.
A magnificent hand-moulded red gum dominates the stage, part landscape and part architecture. Importantly, the design feels built for function as much as beauty: this is bush living that exists with and within the natural environment rather than attempting to separate itself from it.
Karen Norris’s lighting is exceptional, constantly reshaping that environment to carry the emotional temperature of the story. Even the enormous digital screen — and I am generally VERY suspicious of digital screens in theatre — works because it never feels like a substitute for physical design. It extends it. Together, the screen, lighting and set create an Australian bush that feels almost tangible. You can practically smell the bush air and the gums.
A beautiful and unmistakably Australian score balances opera with Indigenous singing, dance and movement, each never overwhelming the other. For the first Indigenous opera to take the Joan Sutherland Theatre stage, that combination feels particularly significant: a European artistic tradition being expanded by the cultural and musical traditions of the country in which it is being performed.
This is a production about motherhood, survival, Country, identity and the devastating racial structures of colonial Australia — but it is also a formidable piece of Australian theatrical craft.
And one that feels like it belongs on this stage.