The Eyes Of Marege
Teater Kita Makassar & Australian Performance Exchange
The Playhouse
OzAsia Festival
Thurs 27 Sept


A bit of a highlight of the OzAsia Festival, this one, mostly because it so aptly follows and emphasizes some of the key aspects of the whole festival, in its collaborative nature which brings together Australian and Asian cultures, quite literally.

Written by Julie Janson, 'The Eyes Of Marege' has been shortlisted for the Patrick White Award which is proper and just given its contribution to understanding the complexity of cultural relationships. On the other hand, the first half of this play very neatly parallels Shakespeare's 'Romeo & Juliet' in a 'boy meets girl' kind of way, showing that the eternal themes remain the best.

The Maacassar people from Sulawesi were seafarers who ranged far and wide in building up their trading links in the region; and their trading partners included the Australian Aboriginals, who dived for the seaslugs which were a highly prized delicacy to the Chinese, with whom the Macassar also traded.

The Yolngu people were the original inhabitants of Australia's northern coastline and though they had canoes, were not great sailors. Along with trade comes cultural links, and as I've already suggested, the ties - which are thought to go back hundreds of years - between Yolngu and Macassar developed into marriage and tolerance, although the Macassar are devout Muslim.

In 'The Eyes Of Marege' a young Yolngu man kills a fisherman over a misunderstanding and an insult which concerns a lost dili bag. In order to keep the peace the young man is sent to Sulawesi to face another people's culture, and is imprisoned for five years.

It's a sputtering and difficult relationship, and it's easy to imagine contact and closer ties between the two cultures worked very much like this. So to it is with this play, where the performance is somewhat staccato, the music accompaniment (a small band ensconsed beneath a bamboo structure intended to represent a boat) is the most vibrant and interesting part of the stagecraft. That the music is used to augment and colour some of the dramatic content, it follows (to an Asian way of thinking) that it also be used for purposes of slapstick, and ridicule, and that asides to the audience also be used to break the tension into manageable portions.

'The Eyes Of Marege' is tolerable enough theatre, good entertainment, but it's hardly high art, being somewhat more homespun in its appeal. That said, it's a worthy addition to the OzAsia Festival.

Alex Wheaton