Review: DIVINE CHAOS OF STARRY THINGS, White Bear Theatre

After the Paris Commune was put down in 1871, leading revolutionary Louise Michel, was deported to New Caledonia, a French colony in the Pacific, partly as punishment and partly in an attempt to "civilise" the indigenous people, the Kanaks through contact with Europeans. It didn't work out that way. Michel respected and learned the culture of the Kanaks, remained wholly committed to the radical cause and even assisted with a local uprising, before a pardon saw her back in Paris and active in politics again.

One can see why the story appealed to Paul Mason, the left-leaning journalist and film-maker and there's plenty of material with which to work - the problem is that Mason is still much more a journalist than playwright, a John Pilger rather than a Barrie Keeffe. The four women's characters are sketched in perfunctorily and we never really get to know them, so we're not as invested in their fates as we ought to be. There's a hint of romance, quickly choked off; a hint of dealing with loss (a clumsy comparison between losing a cat and losing three children is introduced, but goes nowhere); and relations with the garrison consist of shouting and waving a red flag from a hillside.

Those shortfalls in the stuff of drama would matter less if people spoke as people speak. It doesn't help to have the action punctuated by occasional moments of anachronistic jarring - did women really talk about boyfriends "dumping" them in the 1870s and would someone, when escape beckons from a penal colony, shout "We need to pack!" when they are scratching a living from the earth? But the play fails as a result of two choices on the part of the writer.

Firstly, Lisa Moorish plays Michel with plenty of idealistic zeal - we get it - but she speaks as if reading extracts from a pamphlet, speechifying rather than conversing, brooking no argument. Likewise, despite the passage of a decade or so on the island, the women barely develop as characters - the whole thing could be a weekend for all the changes we see in them, as these women survive in a hostile environment. Sure, Jane McFarlane's always more pragmatic Nathalie seeks a pardon, but apart from Michel's oft-stated refusal to accept such a result, there's little to tell us why, nor why Ottilie Mackintosh's Marie suddenly sacrifices herself for Michel.

Secondly, the Kanaks are treated (in my eyes, I'm afraid to say) as almost caricature "noble savages", gently calling each woman "Mama" (in complete contradiction to their stated view that women are "nothing") and continually mouthing philosophical aphorisms about "The Ancestors" and the mystical qualities of the sea and the sky. David Rawlins and Jerome Ngonadi manage to retain their dignity even when performing a perfunctory haka prior to staging their own revolution against the colonial French. Though I'm sure the play's heart was in the right place, the culture of the indigenous Pacific Islanders got a much better deal in Moana. Why don't we see these men speak as friends and warriors? The play is hardly hurried elsewhere.

There's plenty of commitment from cast and creatives in this production and its heart is in the right place - the rallying call to a worn down population to rise and resist has more resonance in the last few years than in the previous fifty - but as a play, it is so underpowered that it never gets beyond its polemical posturing to explore the dramatic potential within.

Divine Chaos of Starry Things continues at The White Bear Theatre until 20 May.