Lyrebird

Overview

Assumptions are dangerous. You can never say everyone is normal. You can never say your home is permanent. You can never say you really know and trust your loved ones. You can never say all the lyrebirds are dead.

Cate invites June over for birthday dinner. It sounds like a pleasant arrangement, but what would have been a nice house in the 'burbs with a laid table, sauvignon blanc, cultured chatter and cake has become something altogether different. Every Australian's worst nightmare has struck them.

Like the insidious acrid tendrils of fire smoke, the atrocities of Black Saturday creep into Lyrebird, written by award-winning writer Amelia Evans and directed by recent NIDA graduate Jemma Gurney. A vast wasteland of charred remains stretches out beyond these five connected yet displaced friends and family, who now live in caravans and use Port-a-Loos. Forced to hang in limbo, homeless, "until the insurance comes through," they must wait. And wait they do.

June (Lucy Miller) convincingly fills the stage as the bubbly family wrecker and shares both tension and laughter with Cate (Sara Zwangobani), the bitter zipped-mouth housewife. The absent patriarch, Tim (Jordan Kelly), lets his eyes drift above and beyond the audience, always searching and hopeful. Meanwhile, the younger playmates, Jess (Maeve MacGregor) and Henry (Christian Willis) awkwardly contend with snap, sex, death, alcohol and early adulthood.

Evans, who grew up in a national park in Kinglake, muses, "It's so much bigger than us; the bush is so overwhelming, so much more significant than these little humans." Set designer Gez Xavier Mansfield re-creates this nebulous yet thrilling phenomenon of the bush on stage through unusual materials and fabrics, conveying a burned-out environment that you can almost smell. Experimental and powerfully atmospheric, sound designer Nate Edmondson's ghost-like echoes, incongruous whizzing, birdcalls and siren trills from 'Heart of Glass' by Blondie leave you filled with a wistful, hollow abandonment felt only in the bush.

No-one knows how each of us would deal with this tragedy until it happens. Some bitterly retreat, some become jolly and reckless, others remain in control or fret, and the odd one goes mad and eats lasagne off the ground. As despair brings people closer, it also lances the truth — a truth ready to ignite and reveal itself.

Assumptions are much too dangerous. I think I heard a lyrebird call...