Five Indigenous men gather at a coastal beach shack, busily carrying beams and corrugated iron across the sand. They yarn while barbecuing in a 44-gallon drum. “Don’t worry, fellas,” says actor Jimi Bani, cheerily assuring them none of the meat is made of culturally sacred animals, “I’ve got all your totem dietary requirements.”
Such culturally specific yet delightfully accessible humour regularly lightens the wide-ranging, mostly weighty load of Dear Son, the theatrical adaptation of Thomas Mayo’s 2021 collection of essays about fatherhood by 13 prominent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men. This production has opened in Sydney at Belvoir Street theatre after its premiere last year in Brisbane and a season in Adelaide.
Dear Son generously invites the audience into its warm and vulnerable camaraderie, much like the essays from which it is drawn, including pieces by writer and journalist Stan Grant, country singer Troy Cassar-Daley and NRL player Joe Williams.
Adapting Mayo’s book, director Isaac Drandic and co-adapter John Harvey have shifted moments from past to present tense for more dramatic effect. Actors Bani, Kirk Page, Tibian Wyles, Waangena Blanco and Drandic himself (filling in on opening night after Luke Carroll fell ill) are each assigned two or three letters to perform, the stories occasionally interleaved, though none of their characters are introduced by name.
These men talk about trauma and healing, drawing on a deep, rich well of often unexpressed emotion, playing supporting characters in each other’s stories. “We pull the oars of truth, with strength from our ancestors,” they repeat in unison, acknowledging society-wide problems of toxic masculinity and misogyny while conveying how government policies and the media have dehumanised them.
Bani is a particularly gifted, charismatic storyteller: in his hands, Kulkalgal man Yessie Mosby’s rite-of-passage essay about his four sons comes to vivid life. Bani here plays a father fighting for his children’s future in the Torres Strait amid global heating that is washing burial grounds away: “We are picking up our ancestors’ bones as if they were shells.”
Page delivers the gravitas of Stan Grant’s essay about his father’s fight to retain his Wiradjuri language and culture, and the scars left all over his body and soul – “Pop is scarred from Australia”, as Grant wrote to his own sons – then the actor displays a gentle bathos as he takes on Daniel Morrison’s story about coming out as gay to his son.
Wyles beautifully leads the singing and acoustic guitar duties, performing Cassar-Daley’s songs Some Days and Windradyne, acting out the singer’s optimistic essay about breaking the cycle of growing up without a father. Later, he shows comic range as a startled white woman, then as a white man who married an Aboriginal woman who “stuck around” to raise his Aboriginal children, based on veteran ABC sports broadcaster and Gurindji man Charlie King’s loving essay about his own father.
Blanco, who is also choreographer for the production, is especially good in the story written by footballer Joe Williams, which expresses regret about his partying and alcoholism (“a Band-Aid on my feelings”), with Blanco falling to his knees as he begs for forgiveness for his selfishness. Wil Hughes’ evocative sound design, David Walters’ lighting and Craig Wilkinson’s projected video elements are particularly effective in such moments.
Drandic, meanwhile, working off the script in his hand, did not project his voice nearly as well as the other four actors, in a performance it would be unfair to judge too much given he stepped in at last minute. Nonetheless, it meant the opening pieces of the first two acts were not as strong as the essays upon which they were based, by Mayo and visual artist Blak Douglas respectively. I would be keen to see what Luke Carroll is like playing those stories.
The denouement of the play is strikingly dramatic: in one section, Wyles acts out the essay written by Wambaya and Gudanji man Joel Bayliss about holding his baby, in 2016, as he gets the news his mother has died. While organising her funeral, he watches the ABC’s Four Corners program in horror as it reports on the abuse at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre; a short while later he is deeply saddened by the late cartoonist Bill Leak’s response to Don Dale, a racist cartoon in The Australian newspaper showing an Aboriginal father with a beer can who doesn’t know his son’s name – “a single image shifting the blame”.
The Leak cartoon prompted Bayliss to fight back with love: he posted to the site then known as Twitter a picture of himself with his two children, Ava and Isaiah, declaring he was a proud Aboriginal dad. The post went viral, the image leading to a national movement known as #IndigenousDads: thousands of people posted photos celebrating Indigenous fathers.
In a master stroke, the final scene has the five actors break the fourth wall and introduce themselves to the audience by their real names, telling their real stories, speaking of their children and their hopes for their future, backed by projected family photographs. I teared up; the empowerment of this truth-telling ran deep.
Dear Son is at Belvoir Street theatre as part of Sydney festival until 25 January
