Sydney Theatre Company

The setting is a country property somewhere in parched wheatbelt Australia. It is a four-hour drive from the city, with patchy phone reception. In Andrew Upton’s adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, the character’s names remain the same, but we find Irina, Constantin, and Boris et al. in twenty-first-century Australia, dealing with mozzies and moaning about the internet, or lack thereof.

Ella Hickson’s centuries-spanning epic Oil was first staged at London’s Almeida seven years ago. It has already been tackled by Australian companies, and Sydney Theatre Company’s production (directed by Paige Rattray) is able to draw on several local actors with recent experience in their roles. WA’s Black Swan mounted the play in 2022 (featuring Violette Ayad), and Red Stitch in 2019 (with Jing-Xuan Chan).

The Poison of Polygamy originally appeared serially in Melbourne’s Chinese Times in 1909–10. Wong Shee Ping’s novella is a kind of Cantonese Rake’s Progress by way of Rider Haggard, relating the wanderings and misadventures of a man sojourning in Australia, and the yearnings of the wife he leaves behind at home.

Do Not Go Gentle, presented by the Sydney Theatre Company, is a marvel of a play, and this is a marvel of a production. Patricia Cornelius’s words, spoken by Scott of the Antarctic and his ragtag bunch of fellow travellers, are poetic, quixotic, trenchant, and potent. The liminal space offered by the ice and the snow of the setting takes the characters deep into their own psychic extremities. They become ruminative, playful, despairing, and libidinal as they encounter the limits of their physical and emotional capacities. They yearn for the ever-elusive South Pole, seeking to reach an end that promises liberation and obliteration.

First things first, the audience loved it. As Julia Gillard, in a performance that blended naturalism and impersonation, Justine Clarke held the crowd in the palm of her hand. They swooned and sighed to the wholesome depiction of Gillard’s working-class Welsh parents and cackled at the pleasurable jokes made at the expense of Kevin Rudd, Mark Latham, and John Howard.