The Eisteddfod was the work that really kicked off the career of Melbourne-based playwright Lally Katz over a decade ago and its Perth debut by the Black Swan State Theatre Company directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler is well overdue. Katz’s opera The Rabbits premiered in Perth a few years ago so it was good to see Katz in her home territory.

The Eisteddfod is a multi-layered work that depicts the claustrophobic lives of two orphaned children trapped in their memories and fears of the outside world. Or as Katz puts it in an authorial voice over that accompanies the work, it shows “their happy lives alone and afraid of the world together.”

The Eisteddfod, Black Swan State Theatre CompanyBrendan Ewing and Natalie Holmwood in Black Swan State Theatre Company’s The Eisteddfod. Photos © Daniel James Grant

Katz’s script is loaded with this kind of sardonic melancholy, a humour that having no time for pathos cuts straight to the quick. She is OK with scenes twisting uncomfortably in and out of humour and pain as the siblings Abalone and Gerture play out their memories and longings through various fantasies.

Tyler Hill’s grimy one-room set...