Dogged
Writers: Andrea James and Catherine Ryan
Director: Declan Greene
SBW Stables Theatre
April 30 – June 5, 2021
Dogged offers theatregoers a unique and startling theatre experience. Unflinchingly facing the problematic relationship between black and white people in Australia, it is a brilliantly conceived, powerfully realised and deeply confronting parable.
In an ever-present, boundless, immediate now, when a mother dingo and a farming woman encounter each other in Gunaikunai Mountain Country, or in Countries all across Australia, both are facing loss. The future for Dingo (Sandy Greenwood) is bleak, as emaciated and desperate she searches for her lost three roly-poly pups – two boys and a girl – and the rest of her pack. The Woman (Blazey Best) with Dog (Anthony Yangoyan), her favourite working animal, is hunting wild dogs for bounty, a measure of her family’s desperation as they struggle to save the family farm.
Alike, they struggle for survival, but unalike in that when Dingo declares she will “stand her ground”, it is her ground, while Woman declares “she has no idea where she is anymore”.
The referential is clear but not simple. Dingo both earthly and mystical, vulnerable but omniscient – a complexity unerringly conveyed by Greenwood – watching and waiting through time but in the present threatened by farmers protecting their sheep, and city blow-ins with their hunting dogs. While at first Woman is awestruck by Dingo’s “purity” and presence, the sheer impact of an animal confident of its place in nature, her respect for it is moderated by the threat it poses to her family’s livelihood.
Dingo can see the benefits of Dog’s servile relationship – a dog’s cheerful eagerness to please beautifully captured by Yanyogan – and food, warmth and protection are tempting. But it is her lived connection with nature that tempts Dog and together they run through the bush, wind in their fur, sun on their back, and together indulge in a pleasurable roll in the entrails of a dead lamb. However, joy is short-lived when they come upon the spent campfire of a weekend killing party and the evidence of senseless and bloody carnage left hanging in a tree.
The Woman in pursuit of Dog catches up and she and Dingo are joined for a moment in mutual revulsion, but Dingo knows the Woman to be culpable for ultimately it is her pack. Although filled with white-hot anger, Dingo still attempts to communicate with the Woman, wants her to understand, and she almost does – and could if she wasn’t imprisoned in a worldview in which animal, humans and land are distinct and separate. When she does understand, what she understands is at the beating heart of the play, the telling of truths hard to hear.
Truths must not only be told but also listened to, accepted, absorbed and acted upon. Killer Dog Lost (also Yanyogan) who erupts into the narrative – abandoned by those “top blokes, Dave and Adrian and Mick” – tries desperately to make up for his inability to navigate now unfamiliar territory by reactionary violence.
There are moments of humour in Dogged – Dingo’s curiosity about why human’s ears “never move. Never” – and moments of pure lyricism as Dingo riffs on the magical annual arrival of moths or mourns her lost family. On the whole the performance is frightening, a sense of threat evoked and sustained through ominous sound and lighting effects (Steve Toulmin, Verity Hampson) and the burgeoning black overhang suggesting both cave and catastrophe (set design, Renée Mulder, Peter Waples-Crowe).
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