Canberra is home to one of the world’s only two museum theatre festivals for schools: Come Alive, running from Wednesday to Friday nights this week at Daramalan College.
The festival, now in its 16th year, showcases theatre inspired by museum collections — this year, the holdings of the National Library of Australia, “a central repository of our history and our culture”, explains founder and artistic director Peter Wilkins.
Students from 10 schools will perform 16 short plays telling the stories of Ned Kelly and Isaac Newton; Australian authors, suffragettes, and stowaways; and 1970s feminism, protest art, and rock music.
All are based on items in the NLA, whose education staff took students on tours, showed them exhibits and the Trove research portal, and helped them to choose items that excited them. Students then researched history and devised scripts.
“It’s been a terrific collaboration with the NLA,” Mr Wilkins said.
‘Museum theatre’ can be a disparaging term for traditional productions — but these plays promise to be entertaining and innovative. Although each play is based on historical facts, styles vary enormously, from naturalistic drama to physical theatre, dance, digital projection, and Australian Gothic theatre.
“The festival’s raison d’être is to bring to life our stories,” Mr Wilkins said, “and to relate to our humanity in an enlightening and entertaining way… My aim is that the audience leaves the theatre having discovered something they didn’t know when they went in.”
Each evening runs to an hour, and consists of four to six short plays, around 15 minutes each.
On the first evening, Wednesday, Marist College pays tribute to young soldiers who endured the Kokoda Trail, exploring their physical hardship, mateship, loss, and survival. St Francis Xavier College’s The Water Remembers interweaves a First Nations legend with true stories of those lost at Devil’s Pool in the Babinda Boulders, QLD. St Clare’s College remembers the Canberra bushfires in Four in the Fire, and critiques purity culture and misogyny in Dress Sensibly, inspired by a 1970s poster.
Thursday’s four plays go back to the 1970s, inspired by the NLA’s Living in the Seventies exhibition. In Lake Tuggeranong’s College The Boxing Day Test, 1975, the first colour TV broadcast is the setting for a domestic drama about lesbianism, the trauma of Vietnam, the Whitlam dismissal, and the Australian obsession with cricket. Alferd Deakin High School’s A Long Way to the Pops is a sitcom about teenagers sneaking into a popular music show, The King of Pop Awards. Merici College presents two plays: The Voice of ’75, in which a telephone becomes the centrepiece for a work about second-wave feminism and Vietnam, and A Record of Time, telling the key events of the decade through 10 iconic songs.
Friday goes further back in history. Ulladulla High School’s This is Your Life is a surreal comedy about the physicist Sir Isaac Newton. Campbell High School’s The Stowaway tells the story of Jeanne Day, a young South Australian woman who secretly boarded a windjammer bound for England. Canberra Girls Grammar School’s two plays depict the lives of two notable women: Journey to Suffrage focuses on the 19th century suffragette Nellie Martel, one of the first four women to stand for federal parliament, and Dreams in Print on Ethel Turner, the author of the children’s novel Seven Little Australians. Daramalan College, the host school, ends the festival with The True Ned Kelly Story, exploring the blurred lines between hero and villain, and Threads of Resistance, an abstract performance about the 1970s Progressive Arts Movement.
The world’s only other museum theatre festival for schools, the Fokida Festival in Greece, has sent a performance of a play based on the myth of Persephone, queen of the underworld and goddess of spring.
“Every single piece in this festival has something that we don’t know about,” Mr Wilkins said.
Even a figure as infamous as Ned Kelly. “We’re very familiar with the story, but the kids have staged it to encourage a different view of him,” Mr Wilkins said. The Kelly Gang murdered three policemen at Stringybark Creek — but how many know that Kelly’s father was transported to Australia for stealing two pigs; his sister was assaulted by a policeman; and his mother was imprisoned?
“There are these little facts in every familiar story that give an insight into motivation,” Mr Wilkins said. “We encourage an audience to look beyond the obvious, to understand why human nature is the way it is, why people behave the way they do, and what the outcomes are of people’s behaviour, and the consequences — because we’re a society that doesn’t necessarily consider consequences.”
Come Alive Festival, Joe Woodward Theatre at Daramalan College, Cowper St, Dickson, Wednesday 5 to Friday 7 November, 7pm. Tickets: $15 (Humanitix). Presented in association with the National Library of Australia.
