The Golden Age
RATING: 3.5/5
Sydney Theatre Company
Wharf 1,   January 19.
Until   February 20
Alongside Griffin's production of Reg Cribb's Thomas Murray and the Upside Down River, and the Sydney Theatre Company's upcoming revival of The Secret River, Louis Nowra's 1985 The Golden Age forms part of an unplanned (I assume) trilogy of plays addressing the legacies of white settlement.
Come to think of it, you could probably add Belvoir's Jasper Jones to the list, too. The national debate has swung to matters economic of late, but Sydney's theatres are gripped by a need to talk about still unresolved issues of our history and identity. 
Nowra's story begins with a tribe of convicts and failed colonists (and one actor) who caught gold fever in the 1850s and disappeared into the Tasmanian wilderness.
Three generations later, at the outbreak of World War II, their descendants are rediscovered by two bushwalkers, Francis (Brandon McClelland), a Melbourne engineer working his way up the career and social ladder, and his friend Peter (Remy Hii), scion of a well-to-do Hobart family.
The lost tribe is a pitiful sight, on its last legs physically and culturally. The wrestling-mad Melorne is decrepit. A boy, Stef, is severely palsied, to the point where he has to be fed like a baby bird.
Mac is malformed, infertile, and, like the woman Angel, unable to speak. Only the woman Betsheb appears to have all her faculties, but "the circle is burst", says Ayre, the tribe's matriarch. She then makes a momentous decision to preserve her peoples' customs and language.
Powerful for its interplay of ideas, if occasionally stilted in its expression, The Golden Age is a true epic, telescoping elements of Greek and Shakespearian theatre into an interrogation of assumptions about cultural superiority.
It demands a strong directorial hand, which Kip Williams, director of the STC's recent productions of Love and Information and Suddenly Last Summer, is qualified to supply.
Designer David Fleischer's set makes no concessions to attractiveness. The world of the lost tribe is no paradise. If anything, under pre-show lighting, his steep mound of earth is an assault to the eyeballs, a colossal cowpat.
Under Damien Cooper's sweeping lights we come to appreciate its earthily, elemental presence and its versatility, however, and the slow breakdown of its original shape, brought about by actors charging up and down its slopes or writhing on its surface.
Williams has cast the play with what seems a deliberate eye for diversity, and for that he must be commended. Having actors of European, Indigenous, Pacific, African and Asian heritage telling this story only adds to its already considerable scope.
Bringing a quietly regal bearing and flinty intelligence to the role, Sara Peirse is perfectly cast as Ayre and pin-sharp in the small but memorable role of Mrs Witcombe. Robert Menzies capers creakily as Melorne and is excellent as William Archer, the doctor whose observation of the tribe in captivity opens his eyes to the world he lives in and, ultimately, brings about his doom.
Liam Nunan makes an eye-catching STC debut as the crippled Stef. McClelland demonstrates leading man potential as Francis, whom we watch morph from keen young bridge-builder to shattered war veteran haunted by images of destruction. Rarriwuy Hick brings her dance skills to the table and she shines as the wild beauty Betsheb.
Anthony Taufa makes a brooding man-mountain out of the silent role of Mac, though is less convincing as the Hobart politician who insists on the tribe's incarceration in a mental asylum. Ursula Yovich, usually so very good, drifts in and out of focus as Elizabeth Archer.
The Golden Age isn't an easy play to watch - nor should it be - but this intelligent, sombre but modulated production confirms its status as one of the most complex and successful dramatic interrogations of our culture.