Review: Songbird at Subiaco Arts Centre

Songbird at Subiaco Arts Centre
Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company is a West Australian arts treasure, a diamond in the rough. For more than thirty years, it has not only provided a platform for both new and established First Nations voices but also nurtured emerging artists across the spectrum of theatre practice and enriched the tradition of indigenous theatre. On every level, this is to be applauded, never more so than in the current moment when the importance of indigenous voices in Australian culture has been shaken.

Shakara Walley’s Songbird is the first production in Yirra Yaakin’s 2024 Season Pass—Three Show Package. The play was developed through the company’s Yirra Yarnz playwriting program a decade ago and had its premiere season at The Blue Room in 2015. This new production is directed by Cezera Critti-Schnaars, working with a team of young creatives—everyone involved is under twenty-seven years of age.

Set in an unnamed outback town, through a tight three-way friendship, the play traverses the rugged terrain between adolescence and adulthood. The characters move from an age of trust and openness to one of privacy and intimacy, from being not quite innocent to not completely experienced. The truth they confront is not simple and straightforward but complex and nuanced, at times more complex and nuanced than this production allows.

To tell the story, Walley adopted a classic mystery formula. In a flashback over five years, she traces the breakdown of this friendship. This is a highly effective way to drive the narrative. From the opening scene, the audience is caught wondering: What happened between the characters to make them so tense with each other? Through the back and forth, we come to know. 

A pitfall in this formula, though—which applies to all mysteries—is to emphasise the action at the expense of the themes. Although the final reveal is immensely satisfying—our curiosity allayed—this can come at the expense of depth, especially the complexity of character and the nuance of motivation. The deeper a play takes you into these areas, the longer it remains with you and the more significant it becomes.

In this production of Songbird, the emphasis falls strongly on resolving the mystery. The play ends abruptly after the reveal, before the characters and the audience have time to process the information and its implications.

This felt incomplete as the story touched on many universal issues that bore further development: the demands and limitations of friendship and intimacy; bravado verses reflection; the multiple layers of betrayal; the difficulty young men have in understanding the complexity of a woman’s emotion and silence; a woman’s need to be loved and supported even if she is not understood; the infuriating male habit of thinking and acting as though he has rights over a woman.

These issues are deeply resonant for young and old alike, but only the theme of friendship in transition was truly explored, while others tended to be skipped over. At seventy-five minutes, it could easily have taken a little more time to go a bit further into some of these areas. Instead, the audience was left with a few too many loose ends.

The performances by Kira Feeney, Owen Hasluck and Tyren Maclou were uniformly strong. Maclou as Mike, the brother/friend caught in the middle, put in a stunning turn. Charlii Strickland’s simple set—bar, stage and rusting corrugated metal—sharply evoked the outback town. Although the action was crisp, Critti-Schnaars' direction could have drawn more from the nuances.

All up though, it was an engaging night’s theatre by a group of important emerging artists. Their voices are sure to become stronger in the future.

IAN LILBURNE

Photos by Tori Lill