Working with Nardi Simpson on The Spirit of Things (for the Liveworks and Yirramboi festivals) brought home to me what a special talent she is; a skilled storyteller, musician and songwriter, with much to say of great worth. That particular production brought together a creative team right out of the top drawer and I was very keen to work with them again; so I guess the starting point for Black Drop Effect was the artists: Nardi Simpson - writer, Lucy Simpson - designer and Mic Gruchy – video maker. Later, Nardi introduced me to the wonderful music of James Henry, who became our composer.
We all wanted to work together again, but we only had vague notions of what our show might be about. Sydney Festival’s announcement that 2020 would focus on the 250th anniversary of Cook’s landing gave us the focus we needed. Immediately before sailing to Terra Australis, Cook had been to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus across the sun. I was fascinated by one little detail of this; his calculations were distorted by an optical illusion that made the otherwise circular disc of Venus appear elongated whenever it ‘touched’ the edge of the sun. This distortion was known as the Black Drop Effect and to describe it exactly would take far too many long words right now. However, in the light of the subsequent 250 years of blood spilling and blood mixing, the term ‘Black Drop Effect’ revealed itself as an multi-layered title.
Writing a play to fit a theme always brings challenges but Nardi came up with a story and script that was fresh, funny and right on the nail – saying all the things we had wanted to say and with characters that were richly complex. Interestingly, it featured lots of stingrays….
By this time I was based back in London and had to return to Sydney in August. 2019 to cast the show; and what a fantastic company we managed to put together; all out of the top drawer!
We were delighted that Bankstown Arts Centre supported and encouraged its development and, alongside Sydney Festival, produced the play. It was always going to be an outdoor production and when I landed in Sydney at the beginning of December 2019 my main concern was whether it would rain. Little did we anticipate the real issues that were to come, in the form of bushfires. Before rehearsals could begin, the sky was coloured red and raining ash; some days, with the temperature at well over 40 degrees (Celsius), it was like Dante’s Inferno. The crew, installing the trusses and lighting rigs, couldn’t work on many days because of the suffocating heat and dangerous air quality. The falling ash was so dense that it got into air conditioning systems and was ‘raining’ in our rehearsal rooms.
Then, of course, just as we opened to the public, it began to rain…
Luckily, we had prepared an indoor version, which was only needed once during the run. Despite the conditions, we didn’t lose a performance and pretty much sold out the run. The technical and stage management crews were absolute heroes throughout the production and I take my hats off to them; they were the A-Team.
As anyone who has done this sort of work before knows, putting on an outdoor show invites challenges, expected and otherwise; light spilling from uptown Bankstown, the smoke and rain, the small matter a main railway line just twenty feet up stage of the backdrop, with trains passing every fifteen minutes. However, working this way also offered us lots of opportunities with scale, beautiful settings and playing with the underlying notion that this story is all about land; its possession, the cultures that exist because of it and the cultures that tried to impose themselves on it.
