Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of WA
August 18, 2018

The break-up of NASA’s Skylab space station as it fell through the atmosphere and across large expanses of south western Australia was one of the great media events of the 1970s. Like playwright Melodie Reynolds-Diarra, I too switched between ABC’s screening of the cult children’s television show Monkey Magic to hear where the next fragment of Skylab might show up. Skylab stories still make for a good yarn today, and the topic has all the makings of a great piece of theatre. Reynolds-Diarra’s decision to cast her skyward-gazing protagonists as a financially challenged Indigenous family further opens up rich possibilities for reading the descent of Skylab as a metaphor for the Australian colonial experience and the Aborigines’ points of view.

Gary Cooper and Liani Dalgetty. Photograph © Dana Weeks

These are the evocative themes which Reynolds-Diarra and director Kyle Morrison have to work with, and while the script has undergone considerable dramaturgical development since appearing at the 2015 Yellamundie National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Playwriting Festival, the current version from Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company and Black Swan State Theatre Company is still something of a shaggy dog.

Act One is largely played straight, in a naturalistic manner, presenting the audience with the domestic dramas of roustabout and small farm owner Nev (Alan Little), his partner Jem (Laila Bano Rind), their three children (Eva Bartlett, Donnathia Gentle and Jacob Narkle), and their uncle Harvey (Gary Cooper) – the last of whom lives in a corrugated iron shed out the back. After Skylab whooshes past close above the house, in Act Two the characters get the ability to make their dreams come true, thereby moving the performance into a more fantastic mode. Subsequent scenes entail Nev and Jem having a Las Vegas style wedding as Elvis and Priscilla, while Harvey becomes a firebrand political leader or agitator. The children adopt the roles of the three main characters from Monkey, namely Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy.

Alan Little. Photograph © Dana Weeks

It is not certain though quite what these transformations reveal about the characters or their situations. As with much of Act One, these motifs function principally as a series of amusing parallel interludes which later simply end. The children do little other than bicker in the role of the televisual characters, Nev and Jem laze about rather aimlessly and not particularly blissfully, while Harvey’s strong rhetoric and powerful physical poise make it unclear if he is meant to be a positive role model – an Australian Malcolm X, for example – or if his barked speech and dramatic arm gestures suggest something more sinister. Cooper is nearly bald and dressing him in a European military sash means that he takes on an appearance not altogether unlike Mussolini, though the intention may in fact have been to evoke the sash worn by Lieutenant Worf in Star Trek Next Generation. There is great potential in all of these ideas, but how they work together and what the audience is supposed to take from them – other than a few guffaws – is less apparent.

The character of Harvey has the most possibilities here, and Cooper brings a nice mix of freewheeling energy and a not quite insane level of obsessiveness to his portrayal. Harvey makes a DIY radio receiver and uses an old book to translate Russian radio signals warning of a dangerous conspiracy at the heart of Skylab’s demise. This dramaturgical model of tapping in to politically charged cosmic airwaves also provided a conceit for David Chesworth’s wonderful 2004 opera Cosmonaut but the potential to use the spatial and temporal uncertainty of radio to draw a link between 1970s Australia, the country’s pre-contact Dreaming stories, and a fantastical future, fails to cohere. Skylab certainly taps into some rich concepts, but in its current, slightly aimless form and languid pacing, it falls short of orbit.

Skylab is at the WA State Theatre Centre until September 2. It then tours to Karratha on September 5 and Carnarvon on September 8