Impressive addition to Gallipoli commemorations

The Dreaming Hill

by Hellie Turner

WA Youth Theatre Co and Southern Edge Art

3.5 STARS

As the centenary of our seminal national tragedy looms, the surge of commemorative activity ranges from the deeply felt to the cynical, from the sublime to the excruciating.

Hellie Turner’s The Dreaming Hill, which was commissioned by the WA Youth Theatre Company and produced in partnership with Albany-based Southern Edge Arts and the WA Museum, is an impressive, valuable addition to those commemorations.

The play imagines a chance encounter between a bunch of young Australian and New Zealander soldiers and nurses on the Greek island of Lemnos, only 50 kms or so from Gallipoli. The boys are going in on Sunday morning, the girls are there to set up a field hospital, and know, even without the matron’s warning against fraternisation, that they will be seeing soldiers again soon, but in very different circumstances.

But youth will have its way, and with the help of some of the islanders, some booze, some tucker and a record player are procured, and the party is on.

Turner writes beautifully here. She captures both the careless spirit of the young Aussies and the ancient horror of war (from the high ridges of Gallipoli, you can look across the Dardanelles to the site of Troy). There is much poetry in her text – it’s remarkable that, apart from a little Tennyson and Shakespeare, it is all her own verse, so authentically has she captured the cadences of bush ballads and war poems.

If there’s a issue with The Dreaming Hill, it’s perhaps that it tries to do a little too much. The description of the Gallipoli landing itself, while perfectly well written and executed, stands apart from the tone of the play, while its emotional impact is more than covered earlier, by a heartbreaking premonition of the work of the field hospital, all the hopes and dreams of youth gone and wasted.

There’s no need to mention individual performances in the 14-strong cast of arresting young actors from Perth and Albany who have been brought together for this production, other than to congratulate them, their director, Renato Fabretti, and his collaborator, Simon Woodward, for successfully managing what must have been a complex, challenging parallel rehearsal process.

And, of course, to observe that the cast’s ages, from 14 and 15 to their early 20s, is the same as their brave compatriots a century ago on those beautiful, fateful shores.

The Dreaming Hill is on at the Albany Heritage Park 23 – 26 April