Lauded Canberra playwright Dylan Van Den Berg is styling his upcoming play at the Street Theatre, The Chosen Vessel, as Aboriginal Gothic. 

That’s a twist on the term Australian Gothic, but it’s not the only twist in this reimagining of a short story written in 1896 by Barbara Baynton, a contemporary of Henry Lawson.

Unsettling, gripping and Gothic are the adjectives he’d like to apply to the play. 

Van Den Berg, familiar as a Palawa playwright with Tasmania ancestry who studied Indonesian and drama at the ANU, has snared a swag of premiers’ awards and AWGIES over recent years.

Nowadays he’s dividing his time between Canberra and Bali, and is completing a PhD at the University of Canberra on the very subject of Aboriginal Gothic.

The Chosen Vessel, initially commissioned by The Street, won the 2022 Rodney Seaborn Playwriting Award, but it takes a while to get a play on stage, so the August production will be a world premiere.

Like Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife, which reimagined Henry Lawson‘s famous short story through the eyes of an indigenous woman, The Chosen Vessel depicts a lone First Nations woman stuck in the bush with a little baby girl, “placing a black body in a white story,” he says.

While he is an admirer of Lawson and Baynton, Van Den Berg noticed that Aboriginal Australians are all but absent in their work.

“So, I’ve used the framework of the story and populated it with new ideas,” he says.

In the process of telling stories in different ways he finds himself once again connecting with his ancestors, particularly his great-grandmother, born on the Bass Strait Islands, a subject explored in his early play, Milk.

Briefly, he says, his play concerns a woman married to a white man, alone in the bush with a new baby. She dreams of heading home, but she can’t because the seasons are changing and she doesn’t have enough money. Then she’s visited by a stranger, a white swagman whom Van Den Berg has no hesitation in describing as “a monster.”

“There’s no letting the audience off the hook with this man,” he says, of a character who represents the colonial managerial regime and is split into eight different characters, all played by Street Theatre veteran Craig Alexander, who as an actor becomes a shapeshifter.

Whether young or old, they enjoy engaging in a power struggle with The Woman. 

“They’re all bastards in different ways,” Van Den Berg says.

At this point, the story converges with Baynton’s and an act of violence takes place, but in his play the woman gets her own voice in an act of truth that lies at the heart of the drama.

Abbie-lee Lewis, the production’s livewire director-actor-writer who trained at the WA Academy of Performing Arts before going on to a dazzling career in directing, says that it’s a challenge to put together the story seamlessly while allowing the shifts in characters. 

She says there are only two actors on stage, The Woman, so named, and a ghostly figure, both played by Laila Thaker, with Alexander playing the eight men.

She’s at one with Van Den Berg in seeing the play as an exploration of Aboriginal Gothic, a device, she believes, that will separate the theme from individual experiences stylistically and allow a safety net for Aboriginal people watching. 

Van Den Berg sees Aboriginal Gothic as defined by the representation of Country as character and the collapsing of past and present.

Visually, they’ve been looking at a colour spectrum – Lewis shows me pictures of indigo blues and ghost gums, images associated with white Australian Gothic, in which the horror of the natural landscape is stressed.

Lewis grew up in the desert around Alice Springs but says the production will be set in a Koori landscape – think gumtrees, stringybark and scrub. As well, they’re creating a sonic Gothic soundscape and costuming it to suggest the 1870s.

Australian Gothic suggests fear of the land, Van Den Berg says, whereas for First Nations, the horror is colonisation and invasion by the white ghosts of the land, a different way of looking. 

“We’re mooshing them together,” he says.

The Chosen Vessel, The Street Theatre, August 9-24.