The Story of The Oars a 90-minute ‘play with spoken-word songs’, but most definitely not a musical, as arts editor HELEN MUSA  discovers when she catches up with author Nigel Featherstone and composer Jay Cameron. 

With a gestation period of almost six years, Nigel Featherstone’s first full-length play, The Story of The Oars is bound to have been worth the wait.

Developed through the Street Theatre’s dramaturgical program and directed by Shelly Higgs, it will be performed by Craig Alexander, Louise Bennet, Sally Marett and Callum Doherty. 

It’s a 90-minute “play with spoken-word songs”, but most definitely not a musical, as I find when I catch up with Featherstone and the composer, Jay Cameron. 

Briefly, the play, divided into two parts, is set somewhere on the east of Australia during a summer in the mid-1980s, when four teenagers drown on a mysterious body of water that comes and goes. 

Sounds familiar? Well maybe, but the lake is never named. 

“I drive by that place,” Featherstone says of Lake George. “It’s not about that place, but it is about a body of water that comes and goes.”

In the second half, 30 years later, with the lake now dry, four strangers gather to commemorate the tragedy – and truths emerge.

Featherstone, the 2022 Canberra CityNews Artist of the Year, is notable for his exceeding modesty. For his 2018 foray into musical theatre, The Weight of Light, about an Australian soldier’s return from Afghanistan, he consulted the eminent poet Melinda Smith to help him ensure that the language was poetic enough to match the music by James Humberstone.

But he is not without a musical background, so at around the time of covid, he had a go at writing a full score.

“I ended up writing the whole thing,” he says, “but then Caroline [Stacey, the director of the Street Theatre] said it was a good start, but that I needed to get a music director and that’s when they went to Jay.”

Besides, he was fearful that it was heading towards musical theatre, a different art form altogether.

“I said, ‘no, it’s a narrative base with poetic language and music,’ but then I attended a workshop with the New York composer David Sisco, who showed me it would be possible to do something with more subtle emotions, and when Jay came on board, he took it in a different direction.”

Cameron looks like an inspired choice. A Scot with a masters in composition from the University of Edinburgh, he met his Australian wife, Kim there and headed south.

They first set foot in Canberra, where he worked as a piano tuner and salesman while composing music for Lakespeare and for Peter Wilkins’ play, The Deadly Game of Marbles, before the pair eventually settled in Perth.

Unusually, Cameron now combines his musical career with a day job meeting bereaved families and organising memorials at the Pinaroo Memorial Park, a cemetery that integrates burial plots with nature.

He was told Featherstone had written both words and music, but that a decision had been made to redo the music, so he embarked on his own version after a few meetings with director Higgs and before a live development period at The Street. 

“But just two days out from the end of our development process, almost the entire score was put to one side,” he says.

“I said, this isn’t working, so I came up with an idea to open the piano up and explore all the crazy sounds the instrument can make. I pulled it apart and started to re-create the world of Nigel‘s piece by working from the inside.

“When the inspiration came to me to look inside the piano, the music became quite ‘out there’, definitely matching the play.”

That involved scraping the strings, hitting the boards and in short, using the piano as a percussion and a stringed instrument to create the very distinctive sounds of the completed work.

“Of course, when I’m playing I’m using it as a keyboard, too,” he says, “I’m pretty excited to be going back on stage into a live environment.”

Featherstone won’t tell us too much more about his play, except that “there’s a mystery element but also a political element as well… I ask the question as to whether Australians are good at telling the truth.”

 “I’ve put all the bad stuff in the boat,” he says.

The Story of The Oars, The Street Theatre, September 19-21.