A wondering soul afloat
Author: Leonard Radic
Date: 14/10/1994
Publication: The Age

That Eye, The Sky, adapted by Justin Monjo and Richard Roxburgh; directed
by Richard Roxburgh; with Alan Flower, Celia Ireland, Tom Lycos, Susan
Prior, Steve Rodgers, Richard Roxburgh, Rachel Szalay and David Wenham.
(Playhouse).

THIS production is the work of a new Sydney company called Burning House.
They made their debut early this year at the Sydney Festival and earned
plaudits for their work. On the score of it, they were given a first-night
guernsey at the Melbourne Festival.

It is a collaborative production where the emphasis is on storytelling,
and where - according to the director's program note - the whole company
has had an input into it. Having looked for their inspiration in
literature from abroad, they finally found it close to home in Tim
Winton's rite-of-passage novel about a slow-thinking boy growing up on the
outskirts of Perth.

In adapting it, Richard Roxburgh and his assistant, Justin Monjo, have
devised a strongly physicalised free-flowing performance style that gives
free rein to the actors' improvisatory skills. At the same time the
adaptation preserves the simplicity, the lyricism - but also the air of
wide-eyed innocence and wholesomeness - of the original.

It does so by focusing strongly on the character of the 12-year-old Ort,
and his reluctant journey into the world from childhood into puberty. Ort
is a simple character who spends much of his time looking up at the stars
and puzzling over the mystery of existence. Only being slow-witted (the
result of meningitis), he brings to his visions and his meditations a
naive and homely quality, which some will find engaging and others
cloying.

For the unsophisticated Ort, the world is both beautiful and baffling,
strange and wondrous. Those qualities of mystery and wonder are caught in
turn, both by David Wenham who plays the part and by Roxburgh (in the
double role of actor and director) and his cast of eight.

The staging is simple, fluid and inventive. The actors climb ladders,
swing from ropes of harnesses, swim in a river or picnic beside a
waterfall. When they aren't involved directly in the action, they join
Grandmother at the piano in providing musical and vocal effects.

The cast work essentially as a team, some at the edges of the story and
some much closer to the dramatic centre - most notably, David Wenham in
the role of Ort, Rachel Szalay as his one-time hippie mother, and Richard
Roxburgh as the tattered preacher in search of redemption.

Between them, they create a piece of theatre which is gentle, unassuming
and unconfronting, and which does exactly what it sets out to do - to
evoke the spirit of Tim Winton's novel in stage terms.

That Eye, The Sky is on at the Playhouse at 6pm and 9pm tonight.