Black Digger is an Indigenous Australian play, written by Tom Wright and directed by Wesley Enoch. This cultural play is beneficial to the onlooker due to it giving the audience member an outlook on how the indigenous Australians got discriminated. This play connects to the audience through the actor’s choices of portrayal and through the use of props, which the director has chosen.
The dramatic meaning used was powerful and without flaw. There was comedy used to lighten the atmosphere and break the tension so it was easier to digest.
When the audience enters the theatre, the first thing they see is three black walls that look as though they have been battered around. This is to symbolise the history that these walls will tell. There is a raised platform centre stage. An uncertainty in the air, due to this blank empty stage, yet the audience knows that the stories that are going to be told are full of meaning. When sitting in your seat one watches the empty stage become full of movement while the actors joke around with each other. One of the men on stage is an aboriginal elder; you see him walking over and then sitting on the right side of a raised platform. He then starts to polish his black shoes. The other men walk around placing props down and getting ready on stage. The show then begins.
In 1914, one hundred years ago, a bullet from an assassin’s gun in Sarajevo sparked a war Brave young men all over the globe lined up to join the fight – including hundreds of Indigenous Australians.
Thousands of Indigenous Australians bravely sacrificed their lives for a country that did not except nor appreciate them and ‘Black Diggers’ goes through those emotions with great detail. Through the war the Indigenous Australians decided to go, thinking that they would come back to a civilisation who would welcome them home with open arms, but they were unfortunately very wrong.
OK… you have to explore the human context in a paragraph…. See the bubble above. Find some specific examples of how the actors made the action and the multiple characters that they inhabited believable and engaging….
When you discuss the relationships, put an emphasis on the white black relationships…is it interesting that it was decided not to include white actors and did this work for the story or make it difficult? What was his reason for only having indigenous cast?
Then you need to get into the tension in the play. There is tension of task as they are obviously joining a war…. There is mainly the tension of relationships on several levels. There is intimiacy as there are real soldiers stories…. Use an example. There is tension of conflict between cultures, more the aussies and the germans which made the lack of conflict between the blacks and whites more telling. There is tension of ceremony, particularly at the end when the two races symbolically merge through the music. There is tension of dilemma as seen when the white guy ran into his comrade aboriginal in the streets who was wearing the sign. There is the tension of misunderstanding…. The indigenous men were misunderstood on various levels…find an example for this stuff.
Then mood…..you need to discuss how the mood was created...think about the lighting and the
