Black Diggers is possibly the most important Australian play of the year.
Wesley Enoch directs Tom Wright's work which relates the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who volunteered for frontline service in World War I. It canvasses the lives, motivations and hopes of a handful of young men before, during and after the Great War.
The acting is neither stellar nor the plot riveting — and therein lie just two of this offering's many strengths: the last things a work of this calling needs is a luminary walking off with the show or a plot so wondrous it perverts history to a fanciful fiction.
The all-Indigenous cast were each most credible and they adroitly surfed their varied characters, those characters' generation changes — and in one case, gender — with an energy and authenticity that one would expect, well, from indigenous, innocent late-teens one hundred years ago. An excellent amplification of the required diversity is found in our interview with cast member Guy Simon who played a mother, a German soldier, a Digger, a German professor, a stockman and a reporter.
The set was minimal — always a joy when the players can carry the theme and hold the audience without props — and the entirety of the space is well utilised, especially the walls, which served as a real-time painting canvas for actors not required in a given scene to style the evolving eras and locales.
Australia's racial prejudice of early 20th century is reflected as fairly and as plausibly as this writer can discern — without the benefit of being an historian or a witness to those events. A respected colleague felt the treatment was preachy, but I disagree. I posit the depiction of the nagging racial divide is critical to the theme; and further, 90 minutes of that undercurrent pales compared to a lifetime lived with it; all of which is ultimately the very point of the play.
Critical attention had been paid to costume authenticity, and a serendipitous discovery occurred for the aforementioned Guy who discovered during production his great-grandfather had actually served in WW1.
Black Diggers is a well researched, legitimate and entertaining treatment of a critical aspect of this country's relatively short, but rich social history. The moving standing ovation on opening night was a fitting modern-day salute to deeds of the pen in the present and the sword of the past.
Black Diggers plays at QPAC Playhouse until 12th October, completing its national run.
