Last modified on Tue 25 May 2021 22.10 EDT
Elaine Crombie stands on a black box stage, surrounded by midden shells on mounds of black earth, her hands clasped in tension. The rage is there in this singular womanâs emotionally affecting performance â and so is the grief.
Crombie, a Yankunytjatjara, Warrigmal and South Sea Islander woman with German ancestry, speaks English and Kamilaroi in this one-woman play, The 7 Stages of Grieving. She finds the sharp rhythm in the poetry of invasion: âMy children, stolen away to a safe place, were wrenched from familiar arms and forced to feed upon another tongue.â
As the latest actor to embody the role of this unnamed everywoman, written by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman and first performed by Mailman in 1995, Crombie blends the skills of her dramatic, comedic and singing career with the scars of her own life, both as a daughter of the stolen generations and as the mother of sons whose skin colour renders them police tar
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âWe wake up in grief for our cultureâ: the return of a landmark play
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Elaine Crombie has just four weeks to shape herself into a one-woman âvesselâ for a landmark play about grief and survival.
Itâs day four of rehearsals and the actor, singer and writer laughs that she is âchaotically organisedâ. In the previous week she has taken her teenage boys Andrew and Michael shopping in Adelaide for ânew shoes and to kit them out as a sayonara from mamaâ, before driving interstate to the Sydney Theatre Company at Walsh Bay to learn