Australia close up: tales of a stolen generation, swastikas and social change

A few years ago in Geelong, a modest seaside city south of Melbourne, Back to Back Theatre realised the direction its new show was taking and decided to slam on the brakes.

"We thought, there's no way we can make this play," recalls the artistic director Bruce Gladwin. "It's just too fraught a subject for a small theatre company from regional Victoria in Australia, who are quite removed from the geopolitical situation or the historical situation involved."

That kind of isolation, however, can be useful. It has allowed Australia’s only remaining full-time ensemble, comprised of performers with intellectual disabilities, to pursue a unique devising method.

It later resulted in the company's most celebrated and provocative production so far, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, which imagines the Hindu god travelling to Nazi Germany to reclaim the swastika.

At the end of a two-week workshop, the performers had developed two figures: the elephantine god Ganesh, who as the Lord of Beginnings and Remover of Obstacles makes an appropriate muse, and a neo-Nazi skinhead.

To see whether they could connect the two, the company researched the misappropriation of the swastika and wondered: what if Ganesh travelled back to Nazi Germany to reclaim the symbol? As stories go, this was a lord of beginnings that required a removing of obstacles: did they have any right to represent that story?

Not typical

As part of Dublin Theatre Festival's Australian season, neither Ganesh nor Back to Back are typical of contemporary Australian theatre. Indeed, the three featured companies – including Australia's longest-running Aboriginal theatre, Ilbijerri; and the playfully alternative Sans Hotel – are all based in and around Melbourne.

"You could just throw a stone here and hit an independent artist," says writer and performer Nicola Gunn of the city. "It's really fertile here. There are brilliant artists at the moment making brilliant live work. We're in charge of our own practice."

Gunn is exuberant and involving, which is also a good description of her idiosyncratic piece Hello My Name Is, for her company Sans Hotel. A participatory performance set in a community hall, it features her volunteer team leader inviting the audience through a series of amusing "getting to know you" exercises towards "changing the world through social transformation".

That may seem obviously ironic – Gunn’s other work has playfully mocked performance art and the language of academia – yet there’s more than a kernel of truth in it. “People think these are earnest or naive ideas,” she says, “but it’s actually just sincerity. We’re so cynical over here, people find it hard to swallow.”

The success of Hello My Name Is has led Gunn to a surge of productivity and brought her work beyond Australia. "I think it's easier for me to tour to Rotterdam than it is to Sydney. Touring is so difficult in this country."

Influenced by European work, her theatre is an easy proposition to make to outsiders, and Gunn can see it in terms both canny and wry.

“Australia is at a distinct disadvantage, being so far away and so isolated. Basically, the government does a really fantastic job of trying to sell our culture and export our culture; we’re kind of for sale.”

Jack Charles Versus the Crown, performed by the 71- year-old actor Charles – or, as everyone knows him, Uncle Jack – is his own story as an actor, Koori elder and activist, as well as a former heroin addict, cat burglar and prisoner.

It responds, says director Rachael Maza, to a long resistance in Australia "to grappling with our uncomfortable history, our ugly history".

Charles, a charismatic and dry figure, is one of Australia’s Stolen Generation, taken from his family at four months.

“It was very evident that, if anyone was able to take us over that line, it would be an artist like Uncle Jack. There are not many people who have survived these stories long enough to tell the tale and with humour enough to make it accessible.”

Charles's rehabilitation was the subject of the 2008 documentary Bastardy, filmed over eight years. Ilbijerri's theatre performance, written with the playwright John Romeril, takes up his story to imagine a legal appeal to have Charles's criminal record sealed, "so I can go and talk to schools, go back to prisons where I am desperately needed. Three-quarters of the inmates there are related to me, so it's not only an obligation, it's a cultural responsibility."

Geographical distance

After the digital revolution and waves of Irish emigrants, Australia feels much closer, a familiar landscape of Skype calls and Facebook feeds.

Still, geographical distance means that our perceptions of its theatre are restricted to whatever travels. In 1999, that might have been Company B Belvoir and Black Swan Theatre's five-hour state-of-the-nation epic, Cloudstreet, at the Dublin Theatre Festival, or, in 2007, Back to Back's remarkable Small Metal Objects.

In recent years it has more regularly been contemporary circus, comedy and cabaret; certainly among the world’s finest, but hardly the whole story.

In Kunstenfestivaldesarts in 2009, after a performance of Back to Back's Food Court, an audience member complained that the company could not have been responsible for writing the show: "They're just not capable of making something like this."

Gladwin can understand concerns about authorship and exploitation working with performers with intellectual disabilities, so the company decided to foreground it and explore the power machinations of making work, like a fictionalised autobiography.

Few works could be more complicated than Ganesh, ethically, morally and theatrically, and the show became an artful telescoping that portrayed the story and the making of a piece of work. But final encouragement came during a tour to Linz, the birthplace of Hitler, where they visited a concentration camp used for the extermination of people with disabilities. "If a company like Back to Back can't touch on that as a subject matter, then who can?" says Gladwin.

Hello My Name Is runs at Smock Alley Theatre from tomorrow until Oct 5; Ganesh Versus the Third Reich is at the O'Reilly Theatre from Wednesday until Saturday; and Jack Charles v The Crown is at the Samuel Beckett Theatre Oct 8-12, as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, dublintheatrefestival.com