The Drover's Wife

by Leah Purcell

seen at the Belvoir Theatre (Sydney) on 5 October 2016

Taking Henry Lawson's classic short story The Drover's Wife as a starting point, Leah Purcell has fashioned a powerful and moving story set in the Australian bush - "an Australian western for the stage" as she puts it. She plays the wife herself, with Mark Coles Smith as Yadaka,Will McDonald as Danny, and Benedict Hardie and Tony Cogin taking other parts. The production is directed by Leticia Caceres.

On a bare and dust-swept stage (designed by Stephen Curtis) the Drover's Wife is protecting herself and her family while her husband is away. Swagmen and blacks may be harmless or threatening, but suspicion reigns in a hard world. In the original story, a passing black man has built a woodpile for her poorly, so that a snake has hidden in it; one night it emerges to threaten the children. This is just an event in the past of this play where the Wife allows Yadaka, another young black man, to do some work for her, and a wary rapprochement occurs. The white men who pass by are suspicious, contemptuous, vengeful and cruel - the Wife survives, but Yadaka does not; her younger children are taken from her, and Danny, the oldest, is only beginning to learn the harshness of life.

The performances are all excellent, centring on the remarkable portrayal of the Wife by the author, Leah Purcell. She invests the woman with stoical strength and reserve, which cracks only in the extremity of pain and at the difficult acknowledgement of her own past. Mark Coles Smith is particularly fine as Yadaka, at times full of assurance when it is safe to be a man of dignity, at other times cowering but with suppressed anger when the white men - peddler, trooper or swagman - exert their crushing presence. The scenes between him and young Danny (a touching Will McDonald), fascinated but unsure about the adventure of manhood, are a hopeful but regrettably unfulfilled interlude before the sense of doom encroaches.

This is a fine re-imagining of a much-loved and widely read classic, giving a far more grim vision of outback life in the 1890s than Lawson could ever have written.