There is something primal in the deep water, something engulfing and expansive in an uninterrupted horizon over an unfathomable deep.
A couple of years ago, I was taken onboard a catamaran past the Tomaree Heads on a gloomy and grey day. There was a point, after passing a solitary lighthouse on a spit of land that stretched out into the water, when we left the modern world - the one we built - behind to be swallowed into the primitive.
There is a prehistoric humility on that limitless horizon that throws the little, impermanent imprints that we beat down on the surface of the earth - so far back there on the land - into a cavernous new perspective.
Out there, past the shallows, we slough off identity as snakes shed their skin (to borrow an appropriately Didionesque comparison).
It's fitting, in that sense, that Ben Winspear's Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP) production of Past the Shallows, adapted by playwright Julian Larnach from Favel Parrett's 2011 novel of the same name, is staged on a almost bare set and acted by a small band of young players embodying multiple roles.
The story, centred on three young brothers growing up in isolated coastal Tasmania under the threat of their abusive abalone-diving father, is set in part on that expansive open water.
As the boys grapple with trauma, violence, fear and despair, desperate to escape their father's destructive orbit, the infinite sea takes on a fearful dualism. The water provides for their broken family, giving them the abalone they sell to survive, but it's deep and unknowable. The boat is a refuge of the familiar, but it has its own monster on board as well. The boys are caught somewhere in between, struggling to reap some sense of safety and solidity as they try on identities like so many oversized men's shirts.
The production, which has toured Tasmania and has now moved to a regional run on the mainland that will take in the Civic Playhouse at the end of the month, is staged by a skeleton cast of three young actors morphing between roles and relying on their performance alone to tell the story.
It's an ambitious, almost Ulyssian undertaking for a group of actors barely out of their teens, but it's one the cast seems to relish.
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Nick Annas, who at various times plays a child, a teenager grappling with his responsibilities to his younger brother and his fear of his father, a young adult on the cusp of manhood yearning to escape the cycle, and the boys' destructive Dad, tackles his debut professional theatrical role with the kind of precociousness of a child born into the creative arts.
At 18, Annas seems to have found that rare clarity in a career that has barely taken flight but in which he feels uniquely at home. His mother was the celebrated principal ballerina of the Australian Ballet in the early 1990s and the inspiration for her son to chase a career in the arts.
"I've had a lot of very colourful personalities come in and out of my house," Annas says. "When I was eight, it was this total obsession - I couldn't do anything but act; I needed to be part of that world."
His mother signed him up to the ATYP troupe less to break him out of his shell, he says with a self-deprecating laugh, and more to "shut me up". He attended workshops, contributed to the organisation's advisory boards, and eventually branched into film.
Annas cut his teeth in commercials as a young child. As a teenager, he broke through with a role in the 2022 COVID-inspired ABC series Soundtrack To Our Teenage Zombie Apocalypse, and later landed a part as a War Boy in George Miller's Furiosa instalment in the Mad Max franchise.
The return to the theatre and ATYP, then, while his first professional theatrical role, feels less like a debut and more like a homecoming.
"It's been such a lovely relationship to keep because it's a lovely group of people ... especially making my professional debut with them, it's a total full circle," he says.
Annas stars alongside seasoned young actor Ryan Hodson, who was part of the original Past the Shallows production staged in 2022, and Brisbane-based theatre actress Molly Walker, who debuted in the Judith Wright Art Centre's Hamlet in 2019 and won the Queensland Theatre Youth Ensemble scholarship in 2020.
The show arrives in Newcastle on October 29 and 30 for a brief two-night run.
The tale leans into themes of rural and coastal sparseness as a metaphoric blank space on which the boys forge their identities and come of age. But, like the expansive sea, that same open space that affords so much potential can be horrifying in its unfeeling desolation. It's a story, Annas believes, that is uniquely suited to a regional audience, native to its language of sparseness.
"There is something so intrinsic about how rural these kids are," he says. "It's such an Australian theme.
"I can't wait for people to see it, especially in Newcastle. I feel like it will connect with Newcastle people ... I just have a feeling about that."
Past the Shallows, Civic Playhouse, October 29 and 30.
