by Tim Winton
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Damon Lockwood
VOICE & TEXT COACH Charmian Gradwell
PRODUCTION MANAGER John Colvin
ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER Victoria Marques
REHEARSAL PHOTOGRAPHY Grant Sparkes-Carroll
PRODUCTION PHOTOGRAPHY Lisa Tomasetti
Mona (Pauline Whyman) and Bender (Tom E. Lewis)
Georgie (Helen Morse) and Lu (George Shevtsov)
Bender (Tom E. Lewis), Georgie (Helen Morse) and Mona (Pauline Whyman)
Lu (George Shevtsov) and Mona (Pauline Whyman)
Bender (Tom E. Lewis)
Bender (Aaron Pedersen) and Georgie (Heather Mitchell)
A Word from the Director
On the surface Signs of Life is a simple story. Two strangers in distress arrive at a farmhouse in the wheatbelt late at night. A woman is there, on the veranda of the farmhouse, frightened, alone. She greets the interlopers with a series of questions.
What has brought these people together? What do they have in common? Why does a dried up river matter to all of them? These questions hang over the play. As the seemingly gentle story unfolds, we realise the depth of Tim Winton’s vision. The play tackles deep questions of identity, sustainability and community without ever offering easy answers.
The woman on the veranda is Georgie. As readers of Dirt Music already know, Georgie is from a well-off middle-class family and although she has been transplanted to a hard rural life, she retains a sense of security, an understanding of her place in the world, only challenged by a loss that occurs before the beginning of the play. When strangers intrude on her sanctuary, in a potentially threatening situation, Georgie overcomes her terror and offers compassion and generosity. Georgie is resilient, adaptable and articulate. In the face of loss and sorrow, Georgie is willing to navigate her way through unknown Territory with nothing to rely on but instinct and daring.
The interlopers are Bender and his sister, Mona. Ironically, Bender has the least sense of place; although he longs to identify with the landscape he is also terrified of its power. He has no traditional language and no real sense of belonging, but he has a profound sense of family – a dedication to his addled sister despite his horror and revulsion at her past. Like Georgie, Bender understands that potent narratives and our relationship with our landscape shape our sense of self and offer us the possibility of healing.
We chose to set the play in a psychic landscape; the farmhouse is an island of loneliness, safety and solitude, inhabited by ghosts and memories. The past has a very powerful hold over the characters in the present, as ghosts interweave effortlessly with the present and claim their reckoning. The ghost of Lu embodies the power of the past. At times, memories seem more potent than the present. Georgie, Bender and Mona cannot inhabit the present with any peace or clarity until they revisit and name their past.
A surprising journey towards mutual respect unfolds as Bender and Georgie form an unlikely alliance. Out of mutual distrust comes surprising understanding. Bender, Mona and Georgie are all damaged, but none of them accept being defined as victims. Only when they face their fears and go to the river, can they experience the potency of storytelling and the wonderment of transformation.
Bringing a new Australian play to life is always a unique journey and a great privilege for the Company. As Socrates said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Tim’s play, full of mystery and grace, reminds us of the potency of those lines, offering us the opportunity as Australians to understand ourselves and our amazing landscape better. I could not ask for a finer collaborator. Thank you Tim, Helen, George, Tom, Pauline, Aaron, Heather, Damon, Ben, Zoe and Jon for collaborating on a journey that celebrates finding signs of life in unexpected places.
Kate Cherry
Director
Kate Cherry is Artistic Director of the Black Swan State Theatre Company
Helen Morse as Georgie and George Shevtsov as Lu in rehearsal
Piano at Ross Bolleter’s ruined piano sanctuary
The Sound Design Process
Signs of Life paints a vivid picture of just how harsh, unforgiving and isolated our outback truly is. Immediately I thought of a number of images I’d seen of Ross Bolleter’s ruined piano sanctuary just outside of York in Western Australia. At the sanctuary, old ruined pianos are left exposed to the elements of weather, acquiring unique musical sounds and abilities. The neglected pianos return to the earth, weathering and warping, cracking and corroding, all the while developing an individual character, one that constantly matures. Ross was kind enough to allow me to record a number of these incredible pianos that have become a large part of the sound design for Signs of Life. Rusty steel strings of a dobro (a resonator guitar), the clanging of frail and abandoned tin sheds and outback atmospheres were also recorded to help create that sense of age and fragility.
Ben Collins
Sound Designer/Composer
The Set & Costume Design Process
I like to find a single word within all the thousands of words that comprise a play, weigh it carefully, scribble it on a bit of paper and stick it to the wall in my studio that sits right in front of me. When I feel a bit lost or afraid, or just plain distracted, I can go back to that word. Having jettisoned all the other words, it’s the thing that I rebuild the whole play around, using the language designers use, which of course can’t be spoken.
Obviously it feels like a blasphemy to strip writing as exquisite as this back to a core, but in the end I chose the word absence. Signs of Life, to me, is about the absence of people we love, the absence of home, the absence of memory and of place. And, as the offspring of all that, the way we fill those voids; what we choose to see or not see in the gaps left behind.
Choosing absence was easy, and immediate. But actors still need to move around a real space, inhabit it. We still need to give them things to hold and speak about, places to go to and somewhere to sit down.
For weeks I would read the play in the dead of night, in a sleeping house: savour a slab of words, shut my eyes and try to imagine placing the person who has said them. But there was just an airwave, a voice disembodied from any landscape or place at all, because the architecture of the stage doesn’t do the thing which a painter’s canvas can do, and in those moments I wished I was a painter. It’s a feeling of woeful inadequacy.
In the end I thought most about the way Mona, Georgie, Bender and Lu speak with each other; perhaps the way we all speak with each other.
There are direct conversations which happen when looking someone in the eye: kitchen-table conversations, easy conversations that sit on the surface of things. And then there are veranda conversations, which can only happen when both people are squinting out into the middle distance or beyond. Some things are so vast or terrifying or beautiful that they can’t be spoken to a person.
To put it simply, then, the stage ended up with a kitchen table and a veranda. All the rest was that absence which we choose to fill somehow, but which remains too big to ever illustrate; in real terms, anyway.
For all that I struggled with designing the set for Signs of Life, the opposite was true of the costumes. Tim’s characters are so finely drawn, so precisely rendered that the job feels already complete, and it was only left to illustrate them visually, which happened as easily as if they flowed out from the end of my paintbrush.
There’s little to say about them then, except that Mona, Bender and Georgie are all wearing someone else’s clothes.
Georgie wears something of Lu’s, more an embrace than a piece of clothing; Mona wears something given in an absent-minded moment, a souvenir of a place she’s never been; Bender wears a mismatch of climates, places and occupations, none of which seem to really belong anywhere in particular. And Lu Fox is in the process of fading, and becoming ash.
It has been an indescribable pleasure, getting to know these characters and watch them fill out and be unfolded by Kate and the performers.
Zoe Atkinson
Set & Costume De
signer
Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD)
FASD is the most preventable cause of birth defects and brain damage in children. The term FASD describes a range of adverse outcomes as a result of exposure to alcohol before birth.
The effects of alcohol damage are permanent, and its impact on individuals, families and communities is profound. Long-term outcomes for children with FASD are poor. Research from overseas suggests that 90% will have mental health problems, 80% will remain unemployed, 60% will come into aggravated contact with the law, and less than 10% will be able to work independently by the age of twenty-one.
Source: humanrights.gov.au/inquiry-foetal-alcohol-spectrum-disorders-2012. For more information on FASD go to alcoholpregnancy.childhealthresearch.org.au and nofasard.org.au
The History & Origins of Pole-Sitting
It’s a strange sight to imagine – you’ve been following the river for days, creeping along the banks and trying to stay hidden, but as you reach a big bend you see something peculiar through the trees. A man perched up a tall pole like he is reaching into the sky, looking out over the surrounding land and holding your future in his hands.
Pole-sitting was a popular activity in the early twentieth century, but the practice is much more than a passing craze. It is the contemporary version of pillar-sitting, which dates back more than fifteen hundred years and has religious origins, something that is not lost on Tim Winton as he explores the role of Lu’s father and his pole-sitting in Signs of Life.
Saint Simeon Stylites is generally considered to have originated pillar-sitting, as part of his asceticism. Simeon was born around 390 ad and from a young age dedicated himself to a life of abstaining from worldly pleasures. It is reported that during one fast he was visited by the head of his monastery, who offered him water and loaves. Several days later Simeon was discovered unconscious, the offerings left completely untouched. Extreme behaviour such as this culminated in him being asked to leave the monastery.
Simeon continued his zealous practices, which included shutting himself in a hut for prolonged periods of time, forgoing any food or water during Lent, and making himself a prisoner on the slopes of Sheik Barkat Mountain. Crowds would venture to the mountain to seek him out, a distraction which left Simeon little time for his devotion, and so he adopted what would become his most famous practice.
Finding a pillar among ruins, Simeon created a small platform at the top. Children from the village would climb the four-metre-high pillar to offer him small pieces of bread and milk. Simeon would not allow women to come near him; he even told his mother that if they were worthy they would see one another in the life to come, a decision she accepted with faith.
The story of Simeon’s extraordinary devotion spread, and a group of monastic Elders decided to test whether it was a sign of humility or pride. The Elders ordered him to come down from the pole or they would drag him away. He agreed to their demand, and as a reward for his obedience was allowed to stay where he was. Followers helped to replace his original pillar with taller ones, the final pillar reportedly standing more than fifteen metres high.
According to the story, Simeon stayed up on the pillar for thirty-seven years and died in 469 AD. His incredible feat was replicated by others, who became known as Stylites. They believed their sacrifices would ensure the salvation of their souls. The practice slowly faded away, and was not heard of until it turned into a twentieth-century fad.
Stunt actor Alvin ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly is considered to have started the trend in 1924, when he sat on a pole for thirteen hours and thirteen minutes. In 1929 he set a new record of forty-nine days. Richard ‘Dixie’ Blandy built a reputation as a pole-sitter with a personal record of 125 days. Blandy is a reminder of the dangerous nature of this activity: he died in 1974 during a four-day pole-sitting promotion when his pole snapped in half. There are also reports from the 1940s of pole-sitters in Melbourne being rescued by the fire department after they suffered severe cramping and collapsed. In another instance, the Mayor of Glenelg in Adelaide ordered the closure of a 1937 pole-sitting contest on ‘humanitarian grounds’.
Lu believes his father used to indulge in pole-sitting to annoy his wife, or perhaps the neighbours, although pole-sitting has also been used as a sign of protest. H. David Werder, who holds the world record with 439 days in the early 1980s, used the publicity from his sit to protest against high gas prices.
In 2010, Australian farmer Peter Spencer sat up a wind tower on a hunger strike for fifty-two days. He was demanding a meeting with the prime minister at the time, Kevin Rudd, to discuss laws restricting the clearing of land on his property.
In Signs of Life, the exact reasons behind Lu’s father’s pole-sitting are never quite clear, but it is what he sees from up in the sky and what he does with the knowledge that is his true legacy. Mona refers to him as an ‘angel-man’, quite fitting given the religious history associated with pole-sitting. This may have been an unusual hobby, but in the case of Signs of Life it is also a sign of salvation and hope.
Jordan Nix
Echoes of Dirt Music
TWO EXCERPTS FROM THE NOVEL
From Part I, pages 112–14
Darkie and Sal leave off playing, wipe their strings and lay the instruments in their tatty cases. They come to the table shining with sweat.
Saw an eagle today, says Bullet with flecks of crabmeat all over his face. Wedgetail, it was.
That’s a beautiful bird, says Sal.
Not as good lookin as our Bird, says Darkie swilling a cracked claw in vinegar.
I saw God, murmurs Bird.
Well, that’s hard to beat, love, says Sal with a grin.
Bullet, you been aced, mate.
The boy goes back to eating. If he wasn’t so hungry, he’d likely pursue it, thinks Fox. Bullet doesn’t fancy being bested.
For a while they eat and talk with the warm night closing in and the house creaking on its stumps. The air is sharp with kerosene and vinegar.
Anyone for a hunk of watermelon? asks Fox.
Fox is the only one not sick to the guts at the idea of melon. Darkie calls them vineturds.
Don’t know what you’re missin out on, youse blokes.
You just go ahead, Lu, says Sal.
Fox steps down off the verandah with an old butcher knife honed away to a crescent. He rolls one off the crate, strikes it with his knuckles and rejoices at the healthy sound it makes. He slips the knife in and feels the melon sigh as it falls open. It gives off a sweet musk which causes the hair to rise along his arms. The sigh, that musk, like the breath of God.
Tear into it, Lu, says Darkie, laughing.
Fox brings the halves back up to the verandah, one in each arm, like a midwife with glistening twins.
Go, boy, says Sal.
Yeah, go hard or go home.
Fox sets his teeth into the flesh, sees the very cells of the stuff turgid, bright with moisture. Sugar cool in his mouth. He chews a moment, spits a few seeds across the rail into the dark.
Spittin blackfellas, says Darkie.
Give over, Darkie, says Sal.
Somethin your grandad used to say, Lu explains to the kids.
If a man can number the dust of the earth, says Darkie, then shall thy seed also be numbered.
He said the seeds were like blackfellas hiding in the melons, says Lu.
What blackfellas? calls Bullet.
Abos, Darkie says.
Oh. Them.
Used to be a mission, says Lu. A camp. Out the back of the river there at Mogumber.
And who was hiding? Bird asks, lost.
Kids used to run away from the camp, Bird. Lookin for their families. Your grandad used to let em stay down the creek where no one would find em.
Then what happened?
They went south. Got caught mostly. Back to the camp. Before my time, Bird.
The girl looks at the seeds buried in the melon.
They only made one of your grandpa, says Sal. Just as well,
eh.
Bullet saunters over to the melon and buries his face in it for the laughs.
*
From Part VI, pages 319–21
The day after she found the envelope in Jim’s desk Georgie went walking to clear her head and make some decisions. The morning was hot and clear. Out on the packed sand of the point she came upon Yogi Behr parked in the company truck. Surfers were just visible in the distance; they sat like kelp bunches out on the reef where the crests of incoming swells peeled back as vapour trails in the northeasterly. Yogi had binoculars clamped one-handed to his face as Georgie sidled up to the window to say hello. One horny foot was up on the dash and the cab stank of ouzo. It took him a while to register her presence.
Ah, he murmured. Wonder woman.
G’day, Yogi.
Always wondered what bras were for. To keep ladies’ arms on with. Me mum never told me.
I bet she didn’t tell you a lot of things, Yogi.
Told me to steer clear of bad luck.
And did you?
See a lot of bad luck when you drive an ambulance.
And some good luck, remember.
But any fuckwit can pick a Jonah, Georgie.
She looked at him. He had the binoculars back to his eyes.
Are you referring to me, Yogi?
Yogi pursed his lips. Those Foxes, he said. Shit luck from go to whoa. The mother, you know, she was killed by an act of God. And the old man, Wally – Christ. He’d go out on a boat and they’d put him ashore before the end of the first day. Crayboats, prawners, sharkboats – he just killed their luck. Like a bad joke. You know one year he built a tree house up a pole in the front paddock. Lived up there for weeks. Bloody fishermen, they’d turn their head drivin past, look the other way so they didn’t get touched. You don’t whistle on a boat, Georgie, and you still don’t take bananas out, but, round here, most of all, you don’t take a bloody Fox on board.
