Review: Heart is a Wasteland at Subiaco Arts Centre
Heart is a Wasteland at Subiaco Arts Centre
Tuesday, October 21, 2025
The Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company’s current production of John Harvey’s striking love story, Heart is a Wasteland, is as much a journey of the heart and soul as it is a musical road trip through Australia’s dusty red centre.
The 75-minute play tells the story of Raye, a struggling singer-songwriter played by Claire Fermo, as she performs her way from pub to pub in an attempt to make it home to her young son, Elvis, in Alice Springs. When Raye meets Dan, another road-weary wanderer played by Maitland Schnaars, at one of her shows, a tumultuous love affair unfurls as the pair embark upon a four-day voyage through the geographical and emotional landscapes that engulf them.
The story paints an intimate portrait of two individuals grappling with the past and present as they each search for belonging. Harvey, a Saibai Island playwright, has crafted two complex characters where each protagonist sways between confidence and insecurity. In so doing, he delivers Fermo and Schnaars’s daunting emotional topography to navigate, but the actors beautifully bring Raye and Dan to life with all the lightheartedness, awkwardness, craving, and doubt intrinsic to every burgeoning love affair.
As well as being the artistic director of the Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, Schnaars acts and co-directs Heart is a Wasteland. With Whadjuk Noongar actor and director, Bobbi Henry, the co-directors have crafted a beautifully nuanced production that masterfully weaves elements as wide-ranging as live music and abstract introspection through a road trip narrative where there isn’t a car in sight.
In so doing the directors are deftly assisted by set designer Eilish Campbell, lighting designer Lucy Birkinshaw, and projection designer Mia Holton. The production team not only effectively convey the openness of the desert setting but also impart a beautiful sense of place through a minimalist stage where sweeping lights conjure the presence of passing cars and muted murmuring thrusts you into the audience of an outback pub.
Then there are the songs. Jeff Bridges once explained how he finally accepted the role of Bad Blake in Scott Cooper’s film, Crazy Heart, once the music was in place despite initially passing on the role. “If you’re telling a story about a musician, you’ve got to have the songs,” he said. In Worimi singer-songwriter Lydia Fairhall, Harvey found the songs his script demanded. From the production’s opening composition, Lover—which introduces both the audience and Dan to Raye in a dusty roadhouse bar—to the production’s inflicting title track, Heart is a Wasteland, which poignantly closes the show, Fairhall’s songs not only propel the narrative but also serve to convey the characters’ emotional depths.
The audience is introduced to the two characters as Raye closes out her set by hawking CDs from the stage. Lurking in the audience with a beer in each hand is a hi-vis-clad miner, Dan, eager to acquire a recording as a means of engaging the artist in conversation. The lighthearted back and forth that follows belies the emotional, personal and societal complexities that unfold as two people who need to feel love and belonging connect and navigate their way through a developing relationship.
Fermo, a DIDA-trained Wilman Noongar actor whose career spans theatre, film, and commercial work and includes stints working with David Williamson and a recent appearance in Nicholas Verso’s adaptation of Shepard Holden’s Invisible Boys, is quick to paint Raye as a self-assured performer who knows where she’s headed. But, when Dan’s demons surface, it becomes obvious her road-weary defiance masks both an inherent empathy and fragility. Fermo’s presence is as compelling as it is striking as she fluently handles a variety of emotionally charged scenes.
Likewise, Schnaars takes Dan’s lost soul in his stride. From his initial comical advances to the brooding darkness that ultimately surfaces, Schnaars draws upon a wealth of stage experience to take Dan’s often tempered presence to explosive heights. A Nyaki-Nyaki actor and director, the WAAPA graduate has previously performed in productions by the Black Swan, Queensland, and Griffin Theatre Companies and toured with Bell Shakespeare’s production of Comedy of Errors. Not only does Schnaars impart Dan with both heart and humour, but he also instills in him an unnerving authenticity.
Heart is a Wasteland is a universal love story refreshingly conveyed through an indigenous lens. Through his heartfelt and humorous script, Harvey not only examines the complexities of First Nations people living in contemporary Australia but also explores themes as varied as racial stereotypes, nuclear fallout, colonial constructs, and the financial immorality of Spotify. Not to mention Coober Pedy’s questionable status as a city of romance. But moreover, Heart is a Wasteland beautifully speaks to the inherent need in all of us to connect and belong.
BRETT LEIGH DICKS
Photos by Jessica Wyld
