One-woman show brings ancestors' voices to arresting life

MELBOURNE FRINGE FESTIVAL

Sandy Greenwood.

Sandy Greenwood.

THEATRE ★★★★
MATRIARCH
Sandy Greenwood, North Melbourne Town Hall, until September 30

Four generations of Gumbaynggirr women come to life in Sandy Greenwood’s Matriarch. The one-woman show traces the artist’s family history, weaving her forebears’ stories into a larger one of strength and survival in the face of a long legacy of dispossession, oppression and violence.

Greenwood has either a great gift for impersonation, or she’s a terrific character actress, or both. The way she channels the women who came before her – their distinct voices, speech patterns and mannerisms – feels effortlessly drawn from life. And their lived experience will haunt you, as it has haunted Greenwood.

Her great-grandmother, a Gumbaynggir midwife with a deep connection to country, survived the Blood Rock massacre. (Some Aborigines escaped the indiscriminate police shooting, in a piteous irony, by fleeing to their traditional birthing caves near present-day Coffs Harbour.)

Her grandmother was abandoned by her husband and left to care for 14 children, who were then snatched by the state; Greenwood's mother was left to grapple with the cultural loss and institutional abuse of the stolen generations.

And Greenwood herself faces down the effects of intergenerational trauma, the lighter skin tone that allows her to pass for white, the complexity and wonder of her cultural inheritance.

Better stagecraft is needed – poor sightlines hide some of the action – and the script could lose its sentimental frame to focus more tightly on the characters and voices that echo through time. That’s Greenwood’s strongest suit, and she makes it feel like part of an oral tradition that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Which, of course, it is.

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