By JESSE GRAHAM
WHILE Their Names are Still Spoken is not a happy performance – that much was given to me as a warning a week before the show by director Evie Housham.
The production opens with a bang – literally, with explosions and gunshots filling the air before a lone soldier, Artie (Greg Hedges) is revealed, sitting in a field of poppies in the afterlife.
Artie, moodily reading the fabled World War I poem In Flanders Fields, is interrupted by his happy-go-lucky friend, Jim (Lachy Castricum), who tries to raise his friend’s spirits (no pun intended) in the aftermath of their lives.
But Artie reveals that Jim died at the beginning of the war while he went on to face the horrors of the battlefield and the sodden morale from witnessing the death of his comrades.
This had led him to question whether the deaths of the Anzacs in WWI was worth it – whether his life and his contribution meant anything at all.
This is the question that While Their Names are Still Spoken, written by Ken Purdham, sets out to answer.
Set simultaneously on the battlefield and back at home in Emerald, the production demonstrates the harsh reality of war for the Diggers and the pain of those they left behind, wondering if their beloved’s names will be added to the weekly casualty lists.
The audience gets a brief glimpse at Artie and Jim before they head off to war, with their girlfriends, Ruth (Ash Herring) and Mary (Tashi Baiguerra), before seeing how the war takes its toll, emotionally and physically, on everyone involved.
Shop owner, Emma Foxford (Claudia Witts), and Emerald resident, Charles Stapleton (Chris O’Neill), provide support to the two girls, while also grappling with young people from the Emerald community dying in the conflict.
Each cast members’ performance was solid, authentic and passionate, and the production didn’t show the glorious Anzac story we are accustomed to, but the bitter impact war had on soldiers and their families back home.
While still fighting on the front lines, Artie remarks to Jim, who is watching him from the afterlife, “They give me the order – ‘over you go’. The odds are no better than tossing coins in the air … my life has become a game of two-up.”
At the same time, it looked into the way the community rebounded from losing its residents to war, and how that community went on to remember those they had lost.
While Their Names are Still Spoken references a saying that people only die when their names are spoken for the last time.
As long as their names are spoken, each year at dawn services across the hills and beyond, then their legacy, both of loss and resilience, continues.
While their Names are Still Spoken’s final productions will be on Friday 24 April and Saturday 25 April, Anzac Day, from 8pm.
The production is performed by the Gemco Players Community Theatre at the Gem Community Arts Centre at 19 Kilvington Drive.
Tickets are $25 for adults, $22 for concession holders, $18 for students or $20 per person in groups of four or more.
For more information, contact Gemco Players Theatre on 5968 2844 or visit www.gemcoplayers.org.
The production contains language, flashes, smoke and noise that may be inappropriate for some audience members.
