Sydney Reviews

Photos – Brett Boardman

This Heaven is a punch thrown. It is a brick hurled. As playwright Nakkiah Lui remarks in the program, it is a Molotov cocktail. "What are these?" Joan asks, as her daughter Sissy tapes posters to a wall of a policeman with KILLER emblazoned across his chest. "Bombs," Sissy replies. She might as well be describing the whole play.

Joan (Tessa Rose) has lost her husband. Her children, law student Sissy (Jada Albert) and blind Ducky (Travis Cardona), have lost their father. They have all lost the court case, in which they were suing the police, trying to hold them responsible for his death in custody. Their lawyer James (Eden Falk) brings them the bad news: the court has ordered the police to pay $9000, a sum far too meagre to even begin to repay their loss, and declared the defendant not guilty. (“Not innocent,” James tells them, “just not guilty.”) They are angry. They are beyond angry. They are furious, irate, enraged. Sissy and Ducky are each determined that there must be something they can do, something more. They refuse to do nothing. They refuse to be silent.

Perhaps the hardest thing to handle about this play – the hardest thing to deal with afterwards – is the futility. Sissy and Ducky desperately want their voices to be heard, but how? Who will listen to two young Indigenous people? How do they make people listen? There is no easy answer – perhaps no answer at all – and This Heaven does not attempt to provide one. We do not know, and they do not know. They are, like Ducky locked in a cell with their dying father, blind. (The scene in which the lights go down and we are, like Ducky, left in darkness is one of the most breathtaking I have ever experienced – breathtaking in the literal sense. It was actually hard to breathe in that oppressive darkness.) They must rage. They must scream. They must be violent. They must set things on fire. But what will it ultimately achieve? The futility makes their rage and their sorrow even more potent. There is nothing they can do, but they must do it anyway.

This Heaven is incredible theatre. It is violent and passionate and explosive. "Don't you want to scream?" Sissy asks. She is nominally addressing a group of people who have responded to a Facebook post, people who will become rioters, but she is also addressing the audience. "Don't you want to scream?" We do, but we don't do it. Instead, we stay silent, sitting quietly in the darkness, wondering if we too, like policeman Ryan (Joshua Anderson) who continually protests that he did nothing wrong, did nothing, are complicit in injustice by inaction.


Belvoir presents
This Heaven
by Nakkiah Lui

Director Lee Lewis

Venue: Belvoir Street Theatre | 25 Belvoir Street, Surry Hills
Dates: 7 Feb – 10 Mar, 2013
Tickets: $45 – $25
Bookings: http://belvoir.com.au