Islander
Creators: Amy Draper, Stewart Melton, Finn Anderson
Director: Hayden Tonazzi
The Popsy, Pier 2/3
October 6 – October 17, 2026
Spend an hour in a 50-seat black box with two actors performing on a plain circular platform and discover how magically luminous a theatre performance can be. Presented by the Australian Theatre for Young People, the Scottish a cappella musical Islander, now reimagined in Pasifika, tells the not uncommon story of a developing friendship between two young people from different worlds, but in a most strikingly memorable way.
Live loop-pedal technology, while used to create different sound effects, is not just a cleverly devised background to their story. We are shown that the technology allows the two actors to make their own soundtrack “out of thin air”, using their own resources to provide community presence at a meeting or otherworldliness at a mystical moment. Watching them in the opening sequence, pre-story, we can feel the strong connection between the two, sustained throughout the performance. While Rebecca Ordiz (Eilidh) and Georgia Laga’aia (Arran) both have excellent voices, their mutual understanding and personal affinity make Islander an outstanding musical achievement.
The sometimes mystical and sometimes grittily real island of the play is evoked by the many ingenious creatives involved in its technical construction. The unadorned circular platform conveys the apparent isolation of an island and the emotional isolation of Eilidh, beached and unable to navigate a course in a fragmenting community. Her mother, whom she accuses of desertion, and her friends seek survival on the mainland, and official solutions to the island’s problems are expedient. Her nan, her mentor and repository of island culture, will pass on soon, as she mischievously likes to remind her granddaughter.
Confused, Eilidh both discovers and is given an answer. In perhaps the most moving scene, a deeply compassionate Eilidh communicates with a dying whale, and soon after discovers a mysterious girl, Arron, stranded on her island. To accept Arron for who she says she is, Eilidh must open her mind and heart to accepting a different perception of creation and to recant her previous rejection of ancient knowledge. As in all myths, physical and emotional ordeal comes before revelation, healing and rebirth.
We think of islands such as Tuvalu and know that inattention to the effects of materialism on other cultures has been disastrous. The prompt to be keepers rather than exploiters, so passionately expressed in Islander, is enhanced by the youthful ardour of the performers, who in their several roles, do full justice to the layered vocals of Finn Anderson’s atmospheric score. Their commitment is well served by Hayden Tonazzi’s sensitive, caring direction.
