Herald Sun SAT 08 OCT 1994, Page 7 ORT TO BE FABULOUS By COSLOVICH G ACTOR David Wenham is 29. He spent a sparkling childhood in the cultural melting-pot of Marrickville, Sydney, and at school was the font of jokes - not the butt of them. Morton Flack is 12, caught in a thorny existence in a dreary outback town, and battling a tragedy-laden puberty as well as the venomous snipes of high-school bullies. But these differences will be cast aside when Wenham plays Morton, or "Ort", in The Burning House theatre company's stage adaptation of Tim Winton's moving tale, That Eye, The Sky. The newly formed Sydney theatre group revels in playing with fire. Not content to stick with the tried and tested, its first production tackles the work of one of Australia's most celebrated authors. "Our policy is not to play safe," Wenham says. "We could have put on another Shakpeare, but we wanted to find something that was Australian and new." Company director Richard Roxburgh was intent on finding a work in the magic-realist literary tradition for the ensemble's inaugural production. But after scouring the works of many a South American writer, Roxburgh and actor Justin Monjo unearthed a magic-realist in their own back yard. "It was an ambitious choice, but we just held our noses and dived in," Wenham says. The choice has proved auspicious. That Eye, The Sky played to enthusiastic audiences at the Sydney Festival in January this year, and next week will test its magic on Melbourne audiences during the Melbourne International Festival. Told in Winton's inimitable self-effacing style, That Eye, The Sky is the simple, poignant story of one boy's coming of age in the most trying of circumstances. Ort's parents are relics from the '60s, tender-hearted old hippies still clutching idyllic dreams of peace, love and self-sufficiency. But a car accident which leaves Ort's father comatose sends their humble but happy lives into a tailspin. The somewhat slow-witted Ort is left to grapple with a mutinous older sister, a muddling mother, a mysterious vagabond and the meaning of life. The challenges of transferring Winton's eloquent tale to the stage prompted Roxburgh to comment that it required the "mad naivete" of all involved. "Mad yes, naive no," is Wenham's response. Taking on the part of a 12-year-old wasn't too arduous for the 29-year-old: "I am an uncle 12 times over, so I have a lot of Ort within me, from observing nieces and nephews. "And Tim Winton makes the character crystal clear so that it's not a quantum leap to play him, even though he is so far removed from myself," Wenham says. But the madness comes in the frenetic physical demands placed on the actors, demands Wenham compares to running a marathon that would do Steve Monaghetti proud. "It is extremely physical," he says. "The actors create the environment, the physical landscape. "The set is sparse. It relies on the actors to bring the scenes to life." Indeed, Roxburgh has actors doubling as chickens, the furniture, cicadas, birds and a cacophony of quirky outback sounds. The company also makes ingenious use of minimal props to bring the magic-realist elements of the play to life: a trick table with more attachments than a Swiss Army knife, seven chairs, a few ladders and two or three ropes are all that will be used to create sets ranging from the vast expanses of the outback to the nightmarish outpourings of Ort's mind. The script is zealously faithful to Winton's work, as it ought to be. The story's humor and lyricism depends on Winton's disarmingly acute descriptions and in-your-face dialogue. "All of the dialogue within the play is Tim Winton's and it follows the same narrative thread as the book," Wenham says. "The only difference is that we had to cut the action that wasn't essential to the plot, otherwise it would have turned into another Mahabharata," he jokes. But have they done Winton's work justice? "It captures it totally," says Wenham, who is an ardent Winton fan, and has just devoured the author's latest book, The Riders. "The best description I heard of the production came from the director, George Ogilvy, who said "it is like naive art on stage'."