Review: The Man From Mukinupin

The Man from Mukinupin
Company B, Belvoir Street Theatre
Until 17 May
Tickets $34-$56
Bookings (02) 9699 3444
Critic’s Rating 7/10


With its musical numbers and classic country setting, The Man from Mukinupin by Dorothy Hewett is like a timeless travelling caravan show conjuring up a pre-World War I environment with good yarns, romanticism and bush heroism.

Written in 1979 and set in the drought stricken wheat belt of Western Australia, the play takes us back to the Edwardian years as white settlement spreads out across the land.

In the town, where people are "muck’n up", Polly Perkins (Suzannah Bayes-Morton) and shop boy Jack Tuesday (Craig Annis) are teenagers smitten with each other much to the chagrin of her parents, Eek (Max Gillies) and Edie (Kerry Walker).

The old black-clad couple fancy the travelling lingerie salesman Cecil Brunner (David Page) as a far more appropriate (and wealthier) match for the beautiful young Polly. All this is while the nosy Hummer sisters (wonderfully played by Roxanne McDonald and Valentina Levkowicz) look on.

When travelling actors Max (also David Page) and Mercy Montebello (Amanda Muggleton) blow into town with a melodramatic show of Othello, young Jack gets a taste for the wider world - threatening to leave the besotted Polly.

The fun loving game of youthful love and innocence slowly erodes as the war approaches.

Introducing doppelgangers for each of the characters, Hewett shows another world over the rabbit proof fence where Jack’s mad brother Harry, Polly’s half-sister Lily and Eek’s star-gazing brother Zeek reside.

Hewett’s play is seen as one of the great works of Australian theatre along with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, The Season at Sarsparilla and The Removalists.In some ways, the ex-Communist Hewett purges herself of everything she is unhappy with in her homeland – imperialism, ecological destruction and black-white relations. Director Wesley Enoch uses colour-blind casting mixing indigenous and non-indigenous actors as they double up and portray the two worlds.

With painted white faces the actors cover up their racial differences and give their characters a ghost-like feel in a world which is long forgotten.

Set designer Richard Roberts and lighting designer Rachel Burke have utilised the dreamlike effect with an eerily dim stage which allows actors to appear from the shadows of the space and float in and out of the action.

The ghost tone of this production, though fantastic and theatrical, flattens the emotional highs and lows, particularly the musical numbers. It meanders at times, lacking a tightness and pace for its 2½ hours.

Hopefully these moments will be ironed out because The Man from Mukinupin hasn’t lost its relevance after 30 years, in many ways getting better with age.