THE SHIRALEE

By Diana Simmonds

November 9 2025

THE SHIRALEE, Sydney Theatre Company at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 6 October-29 November 2025. Photography by Prudence Upton: the company; Ziggy Resnick, Paul Capsis, and Josh McConville; Kate Mulvany

Catching up with a production well into its run means that if it’s a good one, it’s humming and energised. And, on a full house Saturday afternoon, the audience – of real people – sends that hum and energy soaring. It bodes well for what’s about to unfold.

And it goes well from the opening minutes of Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of the 1955 D’Arcy Niland novel, The Shiralee. Director Jessica Arthur makes full use of the Drama Theatre’s wide stage to place vignettes of action across it in ones, twos, and, eventually, threes and more. It creates a visual rhythm that immediately draws in the viewer to an unfamiliar time and place.

This is not the novel, of course, it’s a fully formed play all its own: a play of words, colour, light and emotion, brought to life with magical force. Between them, designer Jeremy Allen and lighting designer Trent Suidgeest somehow keep the space empty while filling it with atmosphere through sunsets and dawns, chilly nights, hot days, Kings Cross slums, and outback towns. All this through mobile motifs of place, manoeuvred on and off by the actors. There are graceful snow gums, a shop counter with tins of bully beef and peaches in syrup. There’s a water pump and other necessities, all wheeled off and on, and swaggies’ flickering campfires that appear from the timber-planked floor that doubles as dusty plains and tired hills.

By turns its beautiful, poetic, evocative of fun and fear – and that’s before anyone has uttered a word. When words come, they are judiciously chosen to bring colour, meaning, and purpose to each character without getting stuck in the period wordiness of the novel. The most significant departure from the original is that the swag or “burden” of the title – the kid, Buster Macauley (brilliant Ziggy Resnick), is nine years old rather than the novel’s four. It makes sense because Buster is a preternaturally articulate and endearingly irritating brat as no four-year-old could be.

Buster’s father, Mac (Josh McConville), is an itinerant worker for whom the Depression years are unkind. He abandons a pregnant lover (Catherine Văn-Davies) in Grafton rather than admit to love and maturity. He arrives back in the Cross, unannounced, to find wife, Marge (Mulvany), in bed with the landlord (Stephen Anderson), and his daughter dead drunk on sweet sherry. Without thinking it through, he beats the shit out of the landlord and takes off with Buster.

The first half is a dark depiction of the era’s poverty and lack of hope. On the road, and on the run from Marge and the authorities, Mac discovers that feeding another mouth – and one that never shuts up – is much harder when work and food are scarce. He’s a taciturn bastard, and it falls to the community of drifters on the road (variously and powerfully rendered by Paul Capsis, Lucia Mastrantone, and Aaron Pedersen) to occasionally give Buster the humanity she craves.

At the same time, humour bubbles under and bursts out at startling intervals, leavening the drama. Composer and sound designer Jessica Dunn adds another layer of meaning to a rich and riveting story, and it’s impossible to look away from what’s being played out during the much-anticipated (by Buster) run-up to her tenth birthday. Her expectations are punctuated by Mac’s inability and then refusal to shuck his apparently heartless carapace.

Will humanity eventually prevail? Does Buster finally get under his skin and find her dad? How do things pan out for the illiterates, the lost, and the lonely in such hard times? Can a kid survive so much barren hardship on innocence alone? These questions and more are asked over the course of two hours and an interval.

The Shiralee might be a classic novel, but this is now its own unique work and not for comparison. You’ll be enthralled, you’ll laugh, be saddened, and even shocked. Tears might threaten, yet finally, the sun rises again. A glorious, timely, human epic.