With Robina Beard as Daisy Bates
Written and directed by Geoffrey Sykes
APRIL 20-29 2023 Actors’ Pulse 103 Regent Street Redfern. BOOK HERE
Reviews
“Beard’s performance as Bates in Geoffrey Sykes’ one-woman play is so feather light she barely seems to be acting. She creates a character as soft as early morning light and just as luminous. The music of her lilting Irish accent effortlessly entwines with the poeticism of Sykes’s script … ****.” Sydney Morning Herald “A riveting and entertaining play, and a warranted success for Beard and all concerned. TALES of Kabbarli is a play of passively provocative insight and poignant emotion, but it also celebrates life. Her writing, stories and vision are fascinating and it’s difficult not be to be spellbound as Beard, in a soft Irish brogue, delivers a master-class in descriptive narrative acting. The sensitive production – with its neat set of an orderly campsite outside a tent – is delightful, crisp, clever and detailed. It re-creates an important historical event with vivid attention to detail and a finely wrought character.” InDaily Adelaide “One knows they are in the presence of a consummate actor, when they never once doubt that person is indeed who they purport to be…dialogue is beautifully lyrical and flows as freely as the mighty river on which his story is set.” Adelaide Theatre Guide “Impeccable”, “one woman’s lament for the vanishing tribes” and of the “tight lipped ghost speaking of the destruction of the tribes of her region.” Melbourne Times “An incredibly simple but intellectually stimulating production … strong and determined woman, selfless, soft spoken and without personal embellishment.”Illawarra Mercury An “engaging … fundamentally interesting work.” 3LO “Robina Beard does not perform the role. When she moves on stage, she viscerally incarnates Kabbarli: Beard breathes Kabbarli into life: dances through gesture and intonation: softly disrobes the audience with poetry …Writer/director Geoffrey Sykes collects the opal-gems of Bates’s activist/anthropological writings, as well as the ochre-grit of her lyric prose, in a rich tapestry that is the playscript he and Beard have refined.” Sydney Arts Guide
Written and directed by Geoffrey Sykes Performed by Robina Beard AV by FilmSouth Tent by J. Cortigo. Music: Peter Sculthorpe – Earth Cry, Sonatina, Mangrove, Night Pieces, and Djilili Ross Edwards – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist
Tales of Kabbarli has been performed La Mama Melbourne (twice), Riverside Theatre Sydney, Holden Street Theatre Adelaide, the National Aboriginal and Torres Straits Dance Academy (excerpts), the Hazelhurst Gallery Sydney and 313 Theatre Wollongong, Pilgrim Theatre Sydney, Darwin Theatre Company (reading) , Bush Chapel Studio Helensburgh, Bondi Chapel by the Sea and Roo Theatre Wollongong.
The play seeks to provide, through memory, stories, characterisation and enactment, a rich imaginary and historical window into the Australian continent and its first peoples, at the time in original tribal life, that can continue to resonate with modern audiences.
It is set at night, in 1939, on the bank of the Murray at Pyap, Victoria, where Daisy Bates, aged 71 and poor, camped alone. She had left the desert, and sought seclusion from the public gaze, while still yearning for contact with passing aboriginals.
Born in 1859, in Tipperary County Ireland, Bates lost her parents at an early age and migrated to Australia in 1882 for reasons that remain unclear. She lived variously in Townsville, country NSW, Sydney and Bathurst, marrying twice (once to Harry Morant aka Breaker Morant) with one son but no divorce.
What is pertinent in the life of Bates was her commitment for many decades to the cause of aboriginal people. It was as a freelance journalist that she visited Broome, Rottnest and Eucla, and her whole life with aboriginals can be regarded, strangely, as what we would call today investigative journalism. She wrote hundreds of articles about aboriginals. However, she was progressively caught up with a profound sense of injustice – especially from her visit to the Rottnest jail – that went far beyond reportage.
From 1918 she re-organised her personal life, and care for her son, and stayed permanently at Ooldea, South Australia, the site of an ancient tribal meeting site. She died in Adelaide in 1951, aged 91.
This work is inspired by the writings of Bates. She provides a white presence that is immersed in indigenous culture at the time of first encounters with western society. She was a witness to the catastrophic clash of cultures at the inter-continental railway depot at Ooldea, and at other locations. Bates’ isolated, pioneering role as an early anthropologist, copiously studying and translating multiple aboriginal languages, customs and tribal homelands can still impress.
Yet the show is more than a docudrama. The work is finally an interpretive piece, aimed at the present day as much as the past. The show gestures to values that can apply today – of reconciliation, of communal societies, of association with the continent as a whole, and for our collective Australian identity.
Robina Beard has been working in the professional theatre since the age of 16, starting as a dancer, progressing to singing, acting, choreographing, and directing. Her passion is Musical Theatre, but she has long-time connections with television, dance, drama, comedy, children’s theatre, and theatre restaurant, both as performer and director. Her most ‘famous’ persona was that of “Madge” the manicurist who extolled the virtues of Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid for nearly 20 years from the late 60’s. In 1996 she took the Festival of Sydney play The Aboriginal Protestors to Germany to the Weimar Festival and Munich. In 2011, she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for ‘services to the theatre – particularly in dance’, as well as the Lifetime Achievement at the Australian Dance Awards – an award treasured by her as it was from her peers in the dance world.