The tragedy that extends through the lives of the Pickles and the Lambs is merely a reflection of a class, a city and a country trying to find its place. The history of the house, a former mission for young Aboriginal girls, is just one corner of a past this country hasn’t confronted. Winton’s book builds off an undercurrent of the isolation of Perth and the darkness this forces on the city. But, racing by in just under three hours, a new perspective is gained on just why previous versions took so much time to tell this story. Victoria Lamb’s set, Ailsa Paterson’s costumes and Nigel Levings’s lighting are always in communication with each other, never more so when Fish (Nicholas Jones) and Quick Lamb (Nicholas Cannon) row down Swan river suspended above the stage. Staging George Palmer’s adaptation is a significant investment by the company: not only in a new Australian work but also in the performance opportunities it offers its largely young and assured cast under the direction of Gale Edwards. It is now having its world premiere as an opera in Adelaide and there are many things to like about this stylish production from State Opera South Australia. Following the two working-class families over 20 years in postwar Australia, the weighty 427-page tome has had an expansive life as an adaptation: first as a five-and-a-half-hour play in 1998 and then a six-hour miniseries in 2011.
C loudsteet, Tim Winton’s 1991 story of the Lambs and the Pickles sharing the house at No 1 Cloud Street, frequently comes out on top of lists of Australia’s favourite novel.
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