Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney A restaging of Louis Nowra’s sweeping period drama hums with historical detail and pulls apart its own definitions of what is primitive or civilised

How do we measure the success of a civilisation? By the monuments they built? By their ability to adapt to harsh environments? Or are there other yardsticks that should be used: their propensity for war and violence? The value they placed on art, culture and nature?

These are the ambitious questions that ring boldly through Louis Nowra’s sweeping Tasmanian period drama The Golden Age, written in 1985 and now staged by the Sydney Theatre Company. It is a play that hums with historical detail and rich, evocative settings – from the darkest pockets of Tasmanian bushland to a Berlin ravaged by the second world war – and constantly pulls apart its own definitions of what is primitive and what is civilised.

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Two friends, Francis (Brandon McClelland) and Peter (Remy Hii), decide to hike through a little-explored corner of the Tasmanian wilderness. There they come across a strange band of Europeans wearing the tattered clothing of a bygone era. The few members who can speak do so in a language unintelligible to the young men. Their meeting is textbook “first contact” – wariness intermingled with curiosity – and will prove a critical juncture in the lives of both parties.

Although not immediately obvious, the story emerges as one seen through the eyes of Francis. Early on the engineer from Melbourne proudly declares himself a “city boy” – his talk is filled with cars, buildings, blueprints, bridges and football; his mother has worked in the same shoe factory all her life. But in meeting Betsheb of the bush wildlings he becomes intrigued by the young mother and is drawn into their primordial world of ferns, flowers, spirits, demons and sex.

His faith in the civilised world is tested twice; first when the bush tribe is reintroduced to proper Australian society (and its thin veneer of gentility) with devastating impact, and again when he is shipped off to Europe and forced to take part in the bloody brutality of the battlefields.

The play’s theme of colonialism lengthens like a shadow as the tribe is subsumed into mainstream Australia, where its members are treated as curiosities and wayward children. But it is an analogy with limits: it paints a cruel portrait if we are to assume that a bedraggled group of émigrés, who in three generations have almost completely lost the ability to speak – and suffer a number of genetic malformations due to inbreeding – are meant to represent Australia’s Indigenous people.

Perhaps in an effort to shake loose that connection, the director, Kip, Williams has colour-blind cast the play, with actors of Indigenous, Asian, African and European heritages mainly playing dual roles across the tribal and non-tribal divide. There is a twist of incongruity when the Indigenous actor Ursula Yovich, as a well-heeled doctor’s wife, utters the line, “They were like those Aboriginal tribes that withered away because their culture wasn’t strong enough. It happens in nature, in human civilisations, one big animal swallows a little one.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ursula Yovich in The Golden Age. Photograph: Lisa Tomasetti

With the three-hour play switching back and forth between at least four settings vivid in their contrast, The Golden Age risks becoming a disorienting experience for the audience. Williams has plonked a huge pile of dirt in the centre of the stage: an aesthetic apt for the hinterlands and trenches but less so for the neat, tidy gardens of Tasmanian aristocrats, or an asylum where the tribe is later held.

Nonetheless, its evocation of an island helps to unify the play’s parts. The tribe has been living in isolation for the past century, essentially confined to an island on an island. And that humble pile of dirt acts as the play’s symbol for emotional despair. As in the words of the English poet John Donne, “no man is an island”, it is the place from which each character, including an increasingly cynical Francis, must reach out.