Stolen

Stolen is a play whose viewing should be mandatory for the title of "Australian". As the title suggests, it is about the Stolen Generations, a horror among horrors of post-colonial Australian history. It follows the stories of five Indigenous Australians taken from their families. The stories are fractured, broken fragments pieced together carefully and laboriously to create an air of something lost. Jane Harrison wrote something very special and the National Theatre Of Parramatta has done Sydney a service to stage it.

Vicki Van Hout directs this production, and her vision is grand but ultimately frustrated. The stage is covered in torn cardboard boxes and the five cast members are on as the audience enters, playing with them, trying to piece them together, trying to work something of them. Behind them is a tree, its limbs wrought in strange, unnatural directions. It's wrapped in different coloured wool. The set is minimal and sets down the idea of a thoroughly theatrical investigation. Except it doesn't quite execute this offer. Strangely enough it's the pace of the piece that is jilting. It is unbearably slow, as if it needed to fill out too long a time for the content. The actors, too, though they had their moments, were too restrained, and sometimes jarringly disengaged from the stories they told. When one hears that his mother isn't dead, that she's in town and he's to meet her, a slight tonal shift was all the audience's emotions had to work with.

Stolen is mandatory viewing — for its content. It should be programmed far more often than it is and it's a privilege to witness it. Riverside's production, though, is hard to place. It's an important and fun night of theatre, but it falters more than it should.