Domestic bliss becomes a cold, bloody nightmare.
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By Harriet Cunningham
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★★★
“Wild never was until you came”.
Woman is hunting wild dogs for the government bounty on their skins. Dog is her companion, swearing fealty in return for pats and treats. Dingo, meanwhile, is a hungry, cold, tired mother desperate to find her pups. When the three meet Woman’s version of the world, a world where dogs lie by fires and humans eat fruitcake is stripped away, explodes, replaced by a cold, bloody nightmare.
Review: Dogged, directed by Declan Greene. Griffin Theatre Company in association with Force Majeure.
Dingo (Sandy Greenwood, a Gumbaynggirr, Dunghutti and Bundjalung actor) stands facing the audience, dressed in a muddied tracksuit with a dingo-like mask. Her opening speech signals concern; a longing for her lost pups.
We then meet Woman (Blazey Best). Woman is of good Scottish heritage, the daughter of homesteaders and sheep graziers. She is out hunting for wild dogs. Woman is preparing a kill, ripping out a souvenir from a bloodied carcass. Her companion is Dog (Anthony Yangoyan), eager for his own reward, a taste of the kill.
Creative director of the Four Winds Festival, Lindy Hume. Photo: Lisa Herbert.
THE sense of excitement is palpable at the Four Winds office in Bermagui as its inaugural creative director, Lindy Hume, takes over the reins for the 2021 and 2022 Easter fes
tivals.
Hume is one of Australia’s best-known festival and opera directors, with stints heading up Sydney Festival, Perth International Arts Festival, West Australian Opera, Victoria State Opera, OzOpera and Opera Queensland, but she’s no stranger to Canberra.
In 1991 she directed Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” (Cinderella) at the Canberra Theatre for the now-defunct Opera ACT, then in 1995 she directed “A Dinner Engagement” by Lennox Berkeley and “Three’s Company” by Anthony Hopkins for the chamber opera company, Stopera.
The chances are that you already know Sybylla: you might have read My Brilliant Career, the novel published in 1901, or seen Gillian Armstrongâs film from 1979. The work, and its author, Stella Maria Sarah âMilesâ Franklin, have left behind a complicated legacy. Franklin was just 16 when she wrote the tumbling, breathless, bold proto-feminist text, and it was not published under a male pseudonym as she had wished (or the title she had wished, with a question mark at the end). Writer and poet Henry Lawson, who submitted the novel to his publishers, revealed Franklinâs secret in a preface he wrote instead. Locals took her writing as a comment on her family and neighbours; the book ended up being pulled from publication until after Franklinâs death.