Thursday’s Child is the latest production from Monkey Baa Theatre Company, who are renowned for the creation and adaptation of new and exciting Australian work for young adult audiences. Based on the multi award winning novel by Sonya Hartnett, I saw the show at Hobart’s Theatre Royal in the middle of its regional tour of the eastern states.

This large theatre production has a cast of six hard working young actors energetically playing the members of the troubled Flute family, as we follow the struggles of this down-on-their-luck rural Australian family during the depression.

It’s a dark and epic tale narrated the through the eyes of the feisty young daughter Harper, as she looks back as an adult trying to make sense of her eventful childhood. Her closest brother Tin, a strange and lonely child, who was born on a Thursday and so ‘has far to go’, spends much of the story burrowing below the family home. As the situation above becomes more and more desperate, his tunnelling takes him further underground and he becomes an almost mystical presence watching over the family.

Exploring complex issues of destiny and choice, survival against the odds and the struggle of the individual to find themselves, the show begins with great promise. It dives straight into the drama and life of the family, with the birth of a new child and the near death of Tin.

Actress Janis McGavin is full of spark as the quirky seven year old Harper. Her naïve little girl imagination, humour and moments of poetic wisdom, jump straight off the page and bring the story immediately to life.

The sound and set are both inspired. Jeremy Silver’s compositions and sound design are delightful, at times cinematic in revelation of atmosphere and at others subtle and beautiful in accent of plot and character. The comic introduction of bossy Mrs Murphy with the musical phrase of a flatulent tuba as she marches in like some sort of disgruntled insect is brilliant.

Imogen Ross’ cleverly stylised set design is the physical vessel which holds the show and the family together on stage. It transforms from a simple wooden floored shack into an island floating above the harsh outback, and then the river bank in flood, before neatly breaking apart to reveal Tin’s subterranean tunnelling, and reforming again as the new family home.

Despite all this, as the play progressed, the initial promise of a sustained or heightened theatricality punctuated by moments of lightness largely disappeared. The directional style seemed stilted and confused and the script overly didactic. Perhaps it was more suitably pitched at a younger audience than the disengaged high school students I sat amongst.

The larger than life characters of the novel were disappointingly two dimensional, with mother always angry, the fathers stoicism wooden and the neighbour in the black hat as the source of all evil, a caricature. Although at times this touched on the edges of interesting melodrama, it never went far enough to really engage and sometimes undercut the seriousness of the drama being enacted.

As the play progressed, as if somehow overwhelmed by the weightiness of its content, even Harper’s spark faded into what seemed to be a repetitive and long cut and paste of the novel.

Monkey Baa Theatre has created some very successful and powerful adaptations for theatre in the past, and I can see why they chose Thursday’s Child. It’s a great read, full of drama, rich themes and quirky Australian characters.

Creating good theatre is hard and the adaptation of a novel to stage particularly so. Theatre is such a different and visceral medium, which demands a certain distillation and reinterpretation in order to work, particularly with such an epic story. It certainly offers and demands so much more than illustration, otherwise why bother?

Perhaps if I had read the novel before I saw the show then the nuances of character and plot that Harper so eloquently describes in the book would have added another dimension that was missing from the stage. But I hadn’t read the novel and neither, apparently, had all but a handful of the 80 or so rural based Tasmanian High School students with whom I saw the show. Maybe, like me, some would go away and be interested enough to find the novel and read it and be excited. That’s great!

But surely that’s not the point of bringing these young adults here in the first place.

This is live theatre and whether they know the story of not, they should have been on the edge of their seats, transported, transfixed, excited, and wanting to see more!

Unfortunately they weren’t and as this was probably the only piece of live theatre that many of them will see this year, then that is a real shame.

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