Sydney Theatre Company is the perfect place for a play about Bennelong: a short walk around the harbour from Bennelong Point, where the Wangal leader lived for a time in the 1790s, and next door to the Barangaroo precinct, named for the Cammeraygal leader he married and had a child with.
Jane Harrison is also the natural playwright to interpret his story, as one of our pre-eminent theatrical truth tellers in plays such as Stolen, about the Stolen Generations, and The Visitors, imagining first contact through an Indigenous perspective. With Bennelong she has her work cut out: a complex, contested figure branded by the colonists as an untrustworthy collaborator and a traitor to his people, and now regarded by some First Nations people as a sellout.
Woollarawarre Bennelong was kidnapped as a young man in 1789, chained and kept in captivity by Sydney’s governor, Arthur Phillip. He learned English quickly and proved an apt student of the colonists’ ways, becoming a prominent figure in Phillip’s circle and a key intermediary between the colony and the Eora. In 1792 he travelled to London, spending almost three years at the centre of the empire, further studying its culture (including frequent trips to the theatre). The experience did not sell him on his country’s would-be conquerors; he turned his back on their culture and colony to return to live among the Eora.
Harrison lands on an ingenious, deceptively simple framework for telling this story. Sebastian (Guy Simon), a young actor in present day Warrane/Sydney who is preparing to audition for the role of Bennelong on stage, summons the spirit of the Wangal warrior (Googoorewon Knox) into his living room – and then proceeds to grill him on his character and motivations.
Harrison interrogates white interpretations of his story and teases out the tensions between past and present Blak perspectives on the man. In putting Bennelong himself centre stage, she foregrounds the frustrations of not being able to tell your own tale. In bringing Sebastian into the room, she gives us a sense of the contemporary stakes of the story. The Bennelong she presents is a complex but comprehensible man: proud, curious, clever, playful; a sophisticated operator in fraught territory. She doesn’t shy away from his drinking, or accounts that he beat Barangaroo. In Bennelong’s words, he’s a devil and an angel, but also just a man.
The show is also very funny, exploiting the comedic potential of the setup and peppering the odd couple’s encounter with jokes about acting and Nida, and making the most of both actors’ comedic chops.
Ian Michael’s production, designed by Emma White, captures the liminal space in which Bennelong and Sebastian operate: between cultures and narratives. In a living room seeded with grass, the walls are decorated with a bark shield, a watercolour landscape and a collage work by the Girramay, Yidinji and Kuku-Yalanji artist Tony Albert, in which he reclaims Aboriginal aesthetics co-opted by the Australian modernist Margaret Preston. The latter is a particularly smart touch.
The play and production could lean more on these poetic tools. As clever as Harrison’s framework is, it also has risks: that you end up with a lot of tell and not much show. Bennelong and Sebastian’s conversation too often feels like a vehicle for exposition, and delivering facts sometimes comes at the expense of emotional truth. Would this sensitive young actor really interrupt Bennelong’s heartbroken story of his wife’s death to tell him that her ashes are buried under what we now call Circular Quay? It not only rings false, it undercuts the emotion of the moment.
The sense of emotional gravitas is punctured elsewhere by comedic segues and rushed pacing. As the exchange between the two men comes to its climax, the actors seem to sprint rather than let us feel the weight of their words.
But when the play slows down and tilts away from naturalism, it feels electric: in a sequence in the final stretch, in which Sebastian “performs” as Bennelong, Trent Suidgeest’s lighting shifts into a dreamlike register and the soundtrack by James Peter Brown swells. The perspectives of Bennelong and Sebastian merge. You feel it in your gut.
Harrison is alive to the challenges of telling Bennelong’s story; Sebastian himself doubts whether any play or performer could pull it off. Within the play, Harrison seems to suggest that the effort is as important as the result. Sitting in the audience, as the stage cuts to black, you have to agree.
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Bennelong in London is on at Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 Theatre until 16 August
