Making History

Directing the first production of Stolen

Wesley Enoch

Jane Harrison’s Stolen is a play that helped to change the course of history. From the first standing ovation at its Melbourne premiere in 1998 through its sold-out seasons across Australia and the world, Stolen found a time, place and issue perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist, and helped to galvanise support for the plight of the Stolen Generations. The play has been regularly revived in new productions, it has toured across the globe and it has been seen by almost 150,000 people. In April 2000 when then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Senator John Herron provoked public outrage by saying that only ten per cent of Aboriginal children were ever taken from their families, the Sydney season of the show sold out within three days. The following month Stolen was performed during the time of the landmark walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge when more than 200,000 people turned out to show their support for Indigenous issues. It’s a rare thing to be involved in a play that encapsulates a definitive moment in art and politics.

Stolen was originally commissioned by Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-operative in 1992, after the success of Up the Road by John Harding. Kylie Belling, current Artistic Director of the company and part of the original Ilbijerri Committee, says that the aim was to create a contemporary piece of theatre that was important to the community. Ilbijerri advertised for a writer and Jane Harrison applied. Harrison and a team of researchers, most notably Antoinette Braybrook, then began interviewing community members and devising a script. I became involved in 1993 and directed a reading of a draft then called The Lost Children. The title was changed when audience members argued that the children were never lost, they were stolen. This happened before the Royal Commission or any broader public knowledge of the Stolen Generations. It is hard to believe now, because it seems that we have always known it, but the general population in the mid-1990s knew nothing about Aboriginal children being taken away as part of a government policy called Assimilation. It is part of the extraordinary nature of this work and the political campaign that surrounded it that this changed.

After the initial reading, Ilbijerri spent five years trying to raise funding for a full production, and undertaking a number of redrafts and workshops in the meantime. It was not until 1997 when Aubrey Mellor, Artistic Director of Playbox, and Sue Nattrass, then Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Festival, teamed up with Ilbijerri to finance the production that it finally got off the ground.

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The five principal characters in Stolen each represent a story common among Aboriginal people:

■   Anne is a pale-skinned child who is adopted and grows up not knowing she is Aboriginal. She must make a journey of discovery to reconcile her identity to her past, both black and white.

■   Sandy is a young man who has been on the run from the authorities his whole life, but refuses to forget the cultural skills passed down to him from his family.

■   Shirley was taken as a child and grows up to see her own children taken from her, personifying the cycle of the Stolen Generations.

■   Ruby is abused and beaten as a young girl, before being trained as a domestic and eventually suffering from mental illness.

■   Jimmy is a vibrant young boy who rebels against the system, is beaten and takes his own life in jail.

The journey of each character is shown by a different structure—a song, a letter, the line-up for example—which is repeated several times to show the changing circumstances and to develop individual narratives. This reflects the practice of traditional storytelling methods which have a repetitive song/dance structure. Such use of repetition not only helps in the learning of a story but it highlights the subtle changes in understanding that may occur over time. As you grow older your life experience affects how you read a story. In this sense, Stolen is less of a play and more of an accumulation of affecting experiences for an audience. It gives an emotional resonance to a political issue.

The brief to Jane from Ilbijerri meant that certain guiding principles were kept at the forefront, and these were passed on to the production team as we brought the show to life:

■   The piece should be contemporary and unlike any other Indigenous theatre piece. We did not want it to be a naturalistic, kitchen-sink drama.

■   There were to be no ‘stars’, it was to be a true ensemble piece.

■   Traditional forms of storytelling should be our greatest influence.

■   We should not shy away from the emotional power of the stories.

Developed in the script and during rehearsals were a number of symbols designed to encapsulate the experience of being taken away and the subsequent feelings of isolation this engendered:

■   A filing cabinet represented the bureaucratic letters and documents that controlled and regimented the children’s lives, but could not be accessed by them. Even today some people have not seen the files that controlled their childhoods.

■   Beds signified the institutions where the children were kept. There was a regimented way to make them and a strict inventory of linen and bedclothes. The beds were moved about the performance space, too, to symbolise how the children were not permitted to settle or rest. Our beds should be places of security and relaxation, but in Stolen they were charged with uncertainty, fear and institutionalisation.

■   The ringing of a bell symbolised the strict authority in the homes and missions, summoning the children to classes, meals or to line up for inspections. In the original production the bell was rung to call the children to be viewed for prospective adoption or a weekend visit with a white family. For some children this led to abuse.

■   Children’s songs helped to emphasise the age of the children at the beginning of the play, and to accentuate their lost innocence and loneliness.

■   Suitcases were the production’s clearest symbol with each character carrying a suitcase to represent their journey and the ‘baggage’ of their lives, their history and their stories. At the beginning of the performance each actor entered with a suitcase. At the end, once the set had been dismantled, they exited, again carrying a suitcase to signify that their journey was not yet finished.

One of the dangers with a play like Stolen is that it becomes a ‘stand and deliver’ experience with motionless actors delivering their lines, preaching their stories. Since true drama needs action, we spent much rehearsal time searching for and developing actions and concepts that distilled the experience of being taken away. In the scene where Shirley is talking about going into the wool shop, for example, the actor held knitting needles and her long panel of knitting unravelled without her knowledge. As the audience saw her hard work falling away, they could identify the feelings of the story in the action.

Indigenous plays are a way of weaving our perspective into the public storytelling of this nation. So much of what the general public knows about Indigenous Australia comes from a white perspective, filtered through the white-owned media. Plays give us a direct way to tell our stories; to give a sense of what it’s like to be Indigenous. We are not a problem to be solved, we are people with emotions and families. The universal themes of Stolen have been the key to its success. Audiences across the globe can identify with the need for a child to have a mother, what it means to be separated from your family, what it must feel like to be denied your culture and language. They recognise that no one should be treated as sub-human.

It is encouraging that a story so specifically Indigenous has had such a huge effect on the nation and on audiences worldwide. It shows that telling a story has the power to affect the course of history. By engaging in fiction somehow we can get closer to the facts and by telling very specific stories we tell universal ones. Maybe ‘truth-telling’ is the role that theatre needs to take into the future as our media become increasingly focused on entertainment and less concerned with seeking the truth; and as our politicians care more about spin than working for a community.

Theatre is a powerful medium because, at its best, drama reaches deep inside its audience and touches their souls, not necessarily to provoke change but to illuminate a side of themselves that may lie dormant. Working on Stolen was one of those experiences for me. Through all the turmoil and terror it has maintained my belief in humanity’s generosity even in the face of extreme hardship, and my faith in the power of theatre to shift the fabric of society.

November 2006

WESLEY ENOCH is the eldest son of Doug and Lyn Enoch, from Stradbroke Island. He has been Resident Director at Sydney Theatre Company, Artistic Director of Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts, and Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre; Associate Artist with Queensland Theatre Company; director of the Indigenous section of the 2006 Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony; and Associate Artistic Director for Company B.

As a writer, his work includes The Sunshine Club, A Life of Grace and Piety, Grace, Cookie’s Table (Winner of the Patrick White Award 2006). Directing credits include The Dreamers, Conversations with the Dead, Capricornia (Company B, Belvoir St Theatre); Stolen, Black Medea (Playbox / Malthouse); The Sunshine Club, The Cherry Pickers, Black-Ed Up, Black Medea, The 7 Stages of Grieving (Sydney Theatre Company); The Sapphires (Melbourne Theatre Company); Black-Ed Up, Radiance, The Sunshine Club, Fountains Beyond (Queensland Theatre Company); Murri Love, The 7 Stages of Grieving, The Dreamers, Changing Time, Purple Dreams, Bitin’ Back (Kooemba Jdarra); Stolen, Shrunken Iris, Rainbow’s End and Headhunter (Ilbijerri).