![]() ![]() The key shift is in the casting: not only is it racially diverse, the actor playing Fish Lamb, the golden child who drowns at the beginning of the play but who is revived with major neurological trauma, is played by neuroatypical actor Benjamin Oakes. Which makes Matthew Lutton’s decision to program it – with small but significant changes to the script and a design aesthetic that seems diametrically opposed to Armfield’s – a bold and powerful one in its own right. ![]() Winton’s novel is a cultural touchstone, and the original stage production, directed by Neil Armfield, is embedded in the theatrical memory. Twenty years have passed since Malthouse’s previous production of Justin Monjo and Nick Enright’s stage adaptation of Cloudstreet, and so much has changed, so much water – not to mention blood and guts and rage and grief – has flowed into and out of the tributaries of our cultural landscape, that it feels like an entirely different work, the answer to a question we couldn’t even articulate back in the late ’90s. He also said that everything flows, that nothing stays still, and again he could be summing up the novel’s central theme. Of course the Greek philosopher didn’t care which river it was he was making a point about change, about the impermanence of experience. When Heraclitus said that you can’t step into the same river twice, he may as well have been talking about the Swan as it flows into Perth, the setting for Tim Winton’s seminal novel Cloudstreet. ![]()
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