SEANNA VAN HELTEN reviews RED SANCTUARY, the final Metro Arts’ Independents production for 2009.

The lifeblood of Brisbane’s independent theatre scene, Metro Arts’ fine Independents program draws to a close for the year with a new Australian play titled Red Sanctuary. The Independents preferences such work that brings original stories to the stage, providing invaluable support, in particular, to emerging practitioners.

The program values creative risk and enables experiment and, through the lens of these criteria, Red Sanctuary makes a veritable contribution. But, unfortunately, some serious production flaws let down this play’s compelling premise.

Written and directed by Tamara Whyte, Red Sanctuary explores the experiences of a young Indigenous Australian woman, Dawn (Chenoa Deemal), living in Asia. In essence, it is a meditative, politically-minded reflection on home and nationality. How does a person’s experiences of the country in which they live relate to their sense of self? 

For Dawn, seeking answers to this question involves fleeing the country of her birth and ancestry – a place in which she feels like an uncanny stranger to white, Howard-era Australia – and working as an English teacher in Japan. The “red sanctuary” of the title is therefore a suitably ambiguous reference to place, conjuring both the crimson dot of the Japanese flag and Australia’s own dry “red” centre. Is sanctuary best sought at home or in foreign exile? 

In Japan, Dawn befriends a European backpacker Aly (Maria Meija); strangers in a strange country, the women reflect on their “togetherness with otherness” against a culturally startling Asian backdrop. Later, when fellow Australian Lera (Ailsa Walsh) pays a visit via Paris, Dawn wonders, after three years of living in a foreign country, if she will ever be ready to return to Australia.

This one-act play is structured in the manner of a personal journal, revealing impressions of Dawn’s Japanese stint as though thumbing through the pages of her diary: we glimpse “lost in translation” moments, phone calls from a long-distance boyfriend, an Asian Christmas, homesick-tinged feelings of both nostalgia and rage towards the place Dawn left behind.

Travel is a significant rite of passage for young Australia, so Whyte’s premise in Red Sanctuary is recognisable but also unique. Her main point of difference here is interesting, namely the atypical experience of a middle-class, adopted Aboriginal woman in culturally-homogenous Japan. Whyte’s writing, refracted through the voice of her protagonist Dawn, prompts thoughtful, sociologically-fuelled debates about modernity, culture, gender, and identity in relation to place.

But this content warrants a stronger dramatic form. There is only a faint narrative through line linking the episodes in Dawn’s journal and, as such, the play merely drifts, untethered, through abstract rhetoric. And, unfortunately, lacking dramaturgical direction, the production’s technical and presentational flaws become all the more apparent.

The play incorporates projected film (captured by Whyte and edited by Timeka Flaherty) and an impressionistic soundscape of bustling city life, Japanese language, and the aforementioned phone-calls home. These audio-visual elements help to evoke a sense of Dawn’s awe and disorientation at her new surroundings, but they do require fine-tuning. At the performance I attended, the soundtrack was by turns muffled and deafening, and thereby hindered the scene transitions the track was designed to elide.

The performers themselves seemed under-confident in their delivery and the pacing was often clunky. But, presentational setbacks aside, what the performances lacked in polish they made up for in their evidently honest responses to the weighty issues in Whyte’s writing. The script’s potential strengths are its smart political conscience and Whyte’s genuine grasp of young, female and Aboriginal experience. 

In its current form, however, Red Sanctuary’s status as a new (and unpolished) work is dismayingly apparent.

RED SANCTUARY performs as part of The Independents 2009 at the Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts, 109 Edward Street, until November 21. For tickets phone 3002 7100 or book online at www.metroarts.com.au

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