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Storm Boy soars anew

Picture: Brett Boardman

It's all but instinctive to insert "the much-loved" before the title, Storm Boy. Colin Thiele's novel of loneliness, love and the hard truths of growing up is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and is constantly being rediscovered by new generations of kids, in classrooms and libraries (it has never been out of print), on film and the stage.

This ambitious, heartfelt co-production will do nothing but enhance its popularity and reputation.

Storm Boy is a sad story, born of several tragedies and moving inexorably to another, but director John Sheedy and his fine, handsome cast (you won't see five better-looking men together on a stage) don't flinch from it for a second.

Hideaway Tom (Peter O'Brien) and his son (the brilliantly convincing Rory Potter, who alternates with Joshua Challenor) live in self-imposed exile in a humpy on the Coorong, the 150km of isolated beaches, wetlands and lagoons stretching south from the mouth of the Murray River.

The boy fossicks for flotsam and jetsam from the storms that blow in from the Great Australian Bight. He meets an Aboriginal man, Fingerbone Bill (Trevor Jamieson, funny and generous in the role made famous by David Gulpilil), also a castaway on the Coorong, and a friendship grows.

Bill nicknames him Storm Boy, and together they rescue three orphaned pelican chicks. The fate of their mother is unknown, but the sound of the guns of careless duck hunters, laying siege to the sanctuary of bird and boy alike, is ominous.

The rest of Thiele's story - the boy's love for the pelican Mr Percival, their heroism and the bird's wanton death - are well known. It's the way Sheedy and his creative team present it that makes this production satisfying and memorable.

The set, by Michael Scott- Mitchell, is a sweeping structure of wooden ribs that could be the skeleton of a huge deep ocean creature, the line of a sea-cliff, a sandhill or a storm-driven wave. It's beautiful to look at, perfectly functional, and portentous. Damian Cooper's lighting is dramatic and subtle in turn, and the soundscape created by Kingsley Reeve, all wind, rain and thunder-crack, is full of movement and power. Sheedy sometimes lets the storm overpower the dialogue; we lose very little, and gain very much, by that decision.

The pelican puppets are graceful and hilarious in turn, swooping above the Coorong, sticking their beaks into buckets and attacking unsuspecting bums. They're a fantastic creation (by Annie Forbes and Tim Denton, directed by Peter Wilson), beautifully manipulated by Shaka Cook and Michael Smith, not so real as to tether our imagination, but real enough to make us laugh, and cry, out loud.

This paper has described Barking Gecko as Perth's most exciting theatre company; it is, and it is also our most ambitious. Their work over the past couple of years has gone to a new level of creativity and production quality, thrilling for their young audiences, and fulfilling for their parents (and grandparents). The scope of the productions it has in the pipeline, in partnership with the Sydney Opera House, Opera Australia and the world's premiere stage company, Britain's National Theatre, is astonishing.

It's like the Dockers making the grand final.