Marathon Cloudstreet offers a Winton classic for our times

When actor Guy Simon was performing in last year’s Sydney Theatre Company production of Harp in the South, he repeatedly heard audience members emerge proclaiming it ‘‘the new Cloudstreet’’. The similarities were obvious: Harp’s five-and-a-half hour running time across two parts will have conjured fond recollections for anyone old enough to remember the famous, and equally long,  production of Cloudstreet that premiered 21 years ago.

At the time it was a secret that Simon had also been cast in a new production of Cloudstreet at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre. He confesses that he’s carving himself a very peculiar niche: ‘‘It’s part of my contract now. It’s got to be an Australian classic adapted from a novel and it must go for five hours.’’

He jokes, but to go from one five-hour show to another suggests the 31-year-old isn’t daunted by a stage marathon. Which is handy, because Cloudstreet isn’t short on reasons to feel intimidated.

From left, Ben Oakes, Brenna Harding, Guy Simon and Matthew Lutton during rehearsals for Cloudstreet.Credit:Eddie Jim

Adapted from the beloved Tim Winton novel by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo, Cloudstreet traces the intertwined fortunes of two working-class Perth families, the Lambs and Pickles, as they ricochet across several decades of the mid-20th century. It kicks off with a drowning and a disfigurement and doesn’t flag in pace across the many years to come, domestic dramas sharing the stage with ghosts and doppelgangers, other-dimensional forays and returns from the dead. It’s the kind of show in which a serial killer doesn’t even show up until the three-hour mark.

Simon says that one of the reasons people still speak with such reverence for the 1998 Cloudstreet is the rarity of sharing such an intense experience with strangers.

‘‘I’ve heard people who watched Cloudstreet back in the day, or watched Harp in the South, talk about the whole thing of sitting with this audience experiencing the same thing and meeting people you hadn’t known before and having a meal with them or going to the pub with them and then going back into the theatre with them.’’

It might be theatre’s Netflix moment, he says. ‘‘It’s tapping into that binge-watching culture. They’re starting to do it in theatre and people are really liking it.’’

Matthew Lutton never saw the original production of Cloudstreet – he was 13 and living in Perth. But he’s long harboured ambitions to direct it and as artistic director of Malthouse Theatre he’s spent a long time trying to determine whether the company could take on such a task.

A huge cast, an enormous transforming set and a running time that includes serving a full meal to audience members? That’s just a day in the office at Malthouse. Cloudstreet’s biggest challenges are less material and more historical.

If the 1998 production was a landmark, it’s a problematic one today. For all its literary merit, this is an Australian play with nearly 40 roles and the one Indigenous character is simply known as ‘‘black man’’. Worse, he’s a wise and all-knowing cipher, prone to cryptic pronouncements while lacking any sense of an inner life.

Then there’s the central character of Fish Lamb, intellectually disabled at a young age but played in the original production by Dan Wyllie. That’s the kind of casting Australian theatre has moved on from.

Dan Wyllie in the original Cloudstreet production.Credit:George Fetting

‘‘A lot of our ideas around representation have completely evolved since the play was written and the first production,’’ Lutton says. ‘‘The disability politics within it immediately needed to be addressed: that disability’s not something to be performed, but that there’s someone bringing a lived experience to that role. And to make sure that the character of Fish is not defined by his disability, but is a full character.’’

Lutton found his Fish in Ben Oakes, who has worked with Geelong’s Back to Back Theatre. ‘‘It was a deal-breaker for me,’’ the director says. ‘‘I wasn’t going to do Cloudstreet without finding Ben. As often happens, I found him and then auditioned everyone around the country and then realised it was Ben all along. He’s an incredible presence and has a great intellectual understanding of the play.’’

Lutton has also tackled the racial imbalance of the text with casting that is not simply colourblind but works against the grain of the original. In Winton’s novel, the Lambs and Pickles are as white as Perth limestone, but in this production many of them are played by Indigenous actors (Simon’s mob, for instance, are Birpai and Worimi from Northern New South Wales).

Conservative theatregoers may cry revisionism, but the halo of nostalgia that surrounds many people’s memories of Cloudstreet, book and play alike, is in some ways at odds with the works themselves. It’s set in the 1940s and '50s, but Cloudstreet doesn’t romanticise history so much as question our understanding of it. Why shouldn’t Lutton treat his sources with the same degree of rigour?

‘‘I’m interested in offering an experience of the novel that isn’t about celebrating the lives of our grandparents but is confronting the lives of our grandparents,’’ he says. ‘‘Feeling what they felt and how that impacts on us today.’’

For all its contemporary sensibilities, this production promises to be every bit as sweeping a spectacle as its forebears, operatic in scope and tapping deep emotional reserves.

‘‘One of the beauties of Cloudstreet is the way emotions and empathy accumulate throughout the show. It’s phenomenal how moving the last half an hour of the show is as a result of the volume of familiarity you’ve gained with all the characters,’’ Lutton says.

It might be long, but it’s not difficult to get swept up in its current. Watching the show in rehearsal, there’s a musical flow to the piece that isn’t obvious on the page. Scenes sometimes just a few seconds long tumble into one another, words and emotions echoing across disparate spaces, and the tone of the whole can switch in an instant.

‘‘There are parts in the play that do incredibly difficult U-turns,’’ Lutton says. One moment the Lambs might be handing out their famous homemade ice-cream to audience members, for example, and two minutes later we’re watching someone holding a knife to their own throat.

‘‘There are things in the last hour of the play that I don’t think you would buy if they were earlier in the play. Characters that are pregnant and four minutes later give birth, really big time jumps. But the play earns that pace by that point. You get thrilled by the pace speeding up.’’

All of this is a big ask for a director who is only 34, but for Lutton Cloudstreet is also a return home to the world’s most isolated city, with all of its beauty and frustration. ‘‘You drive the wheat belt all the way to Margaret River and see it’s a city between a desert and a sea. That’s in the bones of Cloudstreet and I really connect with that. It feels distinctly Perth to me, though sometimes it’s hard to articulate why. It’s a sense of belonging.’’

Cloudstreet is at Malthouse Theatre from May 6.

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