Alternative Media Group

THEATRE: OUR TOWN

Author:

Sophie Mallam

Posted:

Monday, 6 September 2010

It’s the play Soviet Russia banned in occupied Berlin for fear it would inspire a German suicide tsunami. But though Stasi agents perhaps over-emphasised the dark side of the nostalgia driving Thornton Wilder’s 1938 masterpiece, Our Town; too often it is missed by modern American productions focussing on the sweet dying light of a simpler time.

“It’s the most produced play in America, but the last production of it here was in 1976,” says actor Robin Goldsworthy, a lead in the Sydney Theatre Company’s new take on Wilder’s paean to a 1901 New Hampshire town’s citizens meandering dreamily through their daily lives.

“And over there it’s usually produced as a beautiful slice of Americana. But there’s such a sorrow and darkness to this play because it’s really highlighting what people are not paying attention to, the missed opportunities, the rituals we build up around ourselves in life. We just go from one [ritual] to the next to the next to the next and that’s our experience of living a life.

“Being Australian we get a fresh perspective that’s outside of that American tradition and that’s why we’re very well placed to actually get a little bit closer to what Wilder was actually trying to express when he wrote it. Wilder was trying to show people themselves, the simple and beautiful side of things.”

Goldsworthy himself is not inured to the search of lost time Wilder conveys simply enough that the nuances of his poetry of the ordinary are sometimes lost. “I think about it all the time, about reliving periods of my life,” he says. “So there’s sadness there but it’s also really beautiful… [because] Wilder is showing us what is in our hearts.”

Sep 14–Oct 23, Sydney Opera House, $30-85, 9250 1777, sydneytheatre.com.au

Photo by Stephen Dupont

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