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The lost and found generation

by Benedict Nightingale

23 November 2001 - An Aboriginal tragedy returns to London and still packs a punch.

At the start of Jane Harrison's Stolen at the Tricycle Theatre, and again at the end, the five-person cast enters holding shabby suitcases to stand and stare at the audience in a puzzled, stricken manner.

They've clearly been on the move and haven't appreciated the experience. They want an explanation for their rootlessness. Actually, they want an apology - and haven't yet got it, for the Australian Prime Minister doesn't seem too interested in reconciliation. Who are they?

Well, we met their ancestors in ghostly form in Cloudstreet, the marvellous epic that recently came from Sydney to the National. There, they were the restless shades of Aboriginal girls who had been taken from their homes and brought up by a cruel missionary.

Here, they take the roles of children who were being similarly relocated by government decree deep into the 1960s. Some of them actually belong to the "stolen generation", and step out of character to tell us about their fates and feelings in an unselfpitying, unsentimental way.

The same refusal to preach or directly emote marks the play proper too: wisely so, since the subject is innately so disturbing it needs no theatrical italics. Agreed, the writing can be clunky and the dramatic structure is a bit loose. But the "true stories" unpacked from those symbolic suitcases are worth telling - indeed, they are worth repeating, for this is the second time Wesley Enoch's production has come from Australia to London.

At first those stories seem blurry and over-general, but by the end we have come to know the children we meet swabbing the floor or drilling beside the iron bedsteads of an institution whose basic purpose may be deduced by the vast crack in its ceiling and back wall.

All of them want to see the mums from whom they have been snatched, sometimes for reasons as trivial as storing a can of peas past its eat-by date, and their mums want to see them. But every letter from home disappears into the filing cabinet, or steel oubliette, that stands centre stage.

Here's Kylie Belling's timid Ruby: abused by a potential foster parent, forced to become a menial, and driven mad. Here's Elliott Maynard's equally damaged Jimmy, who ends up hanging himself in prison, in hopes (his suicide note says) of finding his mother in the hereafter. Here's Tammy Anderson's Anne, mature enough to be reconciled with her natural parents yet stay on speaking terms with the adoptive parents who pretended they were dead. Here are Glenn Shea's obsessively footloose Sandy, and Pauline Whyman's touching Shirley, who discovers her daughter and grandchildren after a hiatus of 26 years. And what does a child say after such a gap? "Hi, Mum, how've you been?" Do you give her 26 Christmas and 26 birthday presents?

Stolen certainly makes you see the pain, the baffled sense of wrong, behind such questions. At its visceral best it makes you feel them too.

Source: The Times

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