The Sugar House, Belvoir Street Theatre. Photo: Brett Boardman
At its heart The Sugar House, now at the Belvoir Street Theatre, is a play about family and, more specifically, how each generation wants more for their children. However, it is wrapped up in the changing face and fabric of Sydney and will have particular appeal for inner-city dwellers because it is set in Pyrmont (although it just as well could be Balmain, Glebe, Surry Hills, or any of the gentrified suburbs of Melbourne).
The sugar house of the title references the Colonial Sugar Refinery, which began operating in the 1870s in then heavily industrialised Pyrmont. The patriarch of the working-class Macreadies works for CSR and the play flits between the 1960s and the present day in its exploration of a changing city, and what is also the gentrification of a family.
Sacha Horler, Sheridan Harbridge and Kris McQuade in The Sugar House. Photo: Brett Boardman
Women have the dominant roles here. Kris McQuade gives us the wonderfully gritty matriarch, Ruth; Sacha Horler is the bitter Margo, who’s drawn the short straw in her mother’s affections, displaced by the latter’s fears for her son Ollie (Josh McConville); and Sheridan Harbridge, who is superb in her rendition of Narelle, ageing from an innocent eight-year-old to an angry 40-something as the play progresses. Nikki Shiels is spot-on, making full use of her two roles – one as Ollie’s girlfriend-then-wife; the other as the awful Prin, a real estate agent we love to hate – as well as providing some levity to the proceedings.
Playwright Alana Valentine has a lot to tell us in The Sugar House: about the violence and razor gangs of Sydney in the ’60s; of the corruption in the police force and authorities that was rampant; how the poor are kept poor; of the Macreadies’ struggle to break away from the ‘bad blood’ of the past; of protests against Aboriginal deaths in custody (when we get to the ’80s); and how developers are changing the face of Sydney through massive, high rise developments such as Jackson’s Landing, completed earlier this century, which sits where CSR once sat.
For the most part it is so well done that when, as happens once or twice, a couple of points are hammered home – when Margo laments that no-one cares about the families displaced by development, for example – the effect is just a little jarring. (What about the families displaced before the Macreadies, I wondered? What about the people who lived in Pyrmont when it was called Pirrama? Cities change, this is their nature. But back to The Sugar House…)
Narelle is her grandmother’s pride and joy, and also her chief hope for the future: she will take the Macreadies out of their working-class roots (and Ruth’s family’s criminal past, their ‘bad blood’) and into white-collar professional status. Trouble is Narelle isn’t sure she wants to be uprooted and placed somewhere she feels she doesn’t belong. Thus, as well as its reflections on power and poverty, crime and corruption, the play also reflects on identities, both personal and national.
In the Macreadies, Valentine and director Sarah Goodes have given us an intimate look at the struggles of a family, not all of whom are lovely people but all of whom are totally believable and human. There is humour as well as pathos, and a lot of heart. Despite minor niggles, it is an excellent piece of theatre and highly recommended.
And just as an aside, after the performance I wondered about the original use of the building that now houses Belvoir Street Theatre. Way back, pre its Nimrod days, it was once a tomato sauce factory!
The Sugar House is at the Belvoir Street Theatre until 3 June
