Sydney Reviews

Left – Phillip Hinton, Sabryna Te'o and Nicholas Brown. Cover – Nicholas Brown, Sabryna Te'o and Gerard Carroll. Photos – Heidrun Lohr

Alana Valentine’s new play Dead Man Brake is a really excellent work of verbatim theatre. While it is mixed with poetic and musical interludes which don’t mesh that well with the overall piece, the parts of the show that use the direct words of people involved in the Waterfall train derailment of 2003 are deeply moving.

In 2003, a train travelling south from Sydney derailed between Waterfall and Helensburgh. Seven people were killed, including the driver, and many more were injured. Countless emergency personnel assisted in the aftermath. Eventually, an inquiry was launched, which placed the blame for the incident at the door of the weak safety culture of the rail network: the “dead man’s brake” system, which was supposed to stop the train in the event that the driver became incapacitated, was evidently not foolproof. Dead Man Brake traces this journey – through the accident and the immediate response, to the inquiry and to what came afterwards. The mechanisms of verbatim theatre mean that we are constantly aware that this is not something that happened in the abstract: it happened to real people, everyday people, who are now forced to live with the consequences of a situation that had no way of controlling.

It is this – the reality of it – that hits closest to home. I attended the show on the same night as nine of the people that Valentine interviewed to make up the script. One of them was sitting next to me, although I didn’t realise this until they were called up onto the stage at the end of the show. This fact was kind of mind-blowing in itself: while I was obviously aware that the people being portrayed were not just fictional characters, the fact that I was sitting next to one of them made it feel even more immediate, even more real. The stories that Valentine has picked out of the disaster are mostly small ones: stories of individual reactions, not of universal ones. We hear from passengers, from people who responded, from the family of the driver. The perspectives are balanced beautifully. We feel for all these people (perhaps even moreso when they happen to be sitting next to you and you cannot pretend they are some kind of theatrical construct or conceit). Valentine has done an absolutely beautiful job on the verbatim aspects of the script, and Anne-Louise Rentell has done a similarly great job directing them.

I wasn’t so sold, however, on the musical elements. It seems an odd sort of marriage, verbatim theatre (perhaps the most real form of theatre) combined with something akin to the musical (perhaps the most unreal). Valentine’s lyrics are very poetic and lovely when taken on their own, but the transition between the two forms is jarring at times and almost comical at others, which is really not what I think was intended. Daryl Wallis’s music is gorgeous and the performers do a great job of making it sound beautiful, but it felt like two separate shows about the Waterfall train disaster were forced together here, two separate emotional responses. Taken apart, they were great, but together... maybe not so much.

This question of form aside, this is a deeply affecting show. There were more than a few moments when I found myself with tears in my eyes. Anne-Louise Rentell has assembled a wonderful cast who do justice, I think, to Valentine’s script and – more importantly – to the stories of the real people they are telling. Well worth the trip to Wollongong to see.


Merrigong Theatre Company present
DEAD MAN BRAKE
by Alana Valentine

Director Anne-Louise Rentell

Venue: Illawarra Performing Arts Centre (IPAC), 32 Burelli St, Wollongong NSW
Dates: 28 August – 7 September, 2013
Tickets: $49 – $29
Bookings: (02) 4224 5999 | www.merrigong.com.au