Homesickness

In the dried-up and dying West Australian world of Tim Winton's Signs Of Life – the author's second play, which revisits the place and character's of his 2001 Booker Prize short-listed novel Dirt Music – a white woman is greeted by two indigenous guests, Bender and his sister Mona, who arrive on the doorstep uninvited as all three grapple with ideas of place and belonging.

The story's heroine Georgie, played by Heather Mitchell, is haunted by her past and suffering from solastalgia, a condition coined by Murdoch University's Director of the Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy Professor Glenn Albrecht. “It's a type of homesickness or melancholia that you feel when you're at home and your home environment is changing around you in ways that you feel are profoundly negative,” he said in a 2004 paper. This melancholic meditation on place is what first inspired director Kate Cherry to get on board the project – she liked the challenge.

“I've travelled so much, I've been such a gypsy, that that was part of the play that properly spoke to my heart, that sense of looking for somewhere where you belong,” Cherry says, her wandering ways a world apart from the site-specific love of the land that so strongly affects the three characters in Signs Of Life.

“I feel that I'm at home whenever I'm looking at the Pacific,” Cherry continues. “Whether I'm in California or somewhere on the East Coast here, I look out at that particular ocean and feel a sense of belonging. I think that it's because over the years, no matter what country I was in, that was a link, and it linked the two countries I love the most.”

Winton is known for his environmental bent, and his novels have long been regarded for the distinct sense of place – truly Australian – that he imbues in them. Gypsy or not, like the character's in Signs Of Life, Cherry wanted to understand the power of that connection, and was inspired by Winton's skill in inscribing landscapes with broader meaning.

“Tim is brilliant, so lyrical, and has such a claim to creating and mythologising our landscape for us in a new way,” she says. “So you look at it, and you think, 'I've seen it a million times, but I've never seen it that way before'. I love walking around a place with Tim and listening to him describe the place and seeing it through his eyes with such a sense of warmth and love of where he is. And yet also he is, at the same time, mythologising it and endowing it and theatricalising it.”

Looking to her own life once again, her own nomadic concept of belonging, Cherry found the way to stage Winton's natural landscape, and pay homage to the more complex psychic landscape that plays atop it.

“I love looking at the horizon from both places,” says Cherry, reflecting once more on the Pacific Ocean and what it offers her. “That was something Zoe [Atkinson, designer] and I both felt keenly too; that the horizon of Tim's space should give both a sense of belonging and a sense of absolute expanse; sanctuary, an island, and yet it is endless at the same time.”

WHAT: Signs Of Life

WHERE & WHEN: Friday 2 November to Saturday 22 December, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House