Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Oct 6 – Nov 29, 2025
Playwright: Kate Mulvany (from the novel by D’Arcy Niland)
Director: Jessica Arthur
Cast: Stephen Anderson, Paul Capsis, Lucia Mastrantone, Josh McConville, Kate Mulvany, Aaron Pedersen, Ziggy Resnick, Catherine Văn-Davies
Images by Prudence Upton
Theatre review
In Kate Mulvany’s retelling of The Shiralee, D’Arcy Niland’s 1955 novel, the swagman Macauley finds purpose only when he chooses to embrace his parental responsibilities as his daughter Buster approaches her tenth birthday. Together they walk through the shadow of the Great Depression, where dust and hunger become the measure of endurance. The hardships they face quickly draw them close, allowing both to flourish in unexpected ways.
What was once a folksy tale of toil and redemption is transformed by Mulvany’s deft writing into something vibrantly humorous and sharply contemporary. Her play is delightful, charming, and consistently hilarious — a thoroughly entertaining reimagining that recontextualises a classic story for modern sensibilities.
Directed by Jessica Arthur, the production leans wholeheartedly into its comedic potential, unearthing every possible moment of laughter to create a show brimming with joy and playfulness. Driven by an expansive imagination and free-spirited inventiveness, Arthur’s work is a profound uplift, offering sincere explorations of love, belonging, and the meaning of home.
The cast glows with an irresistible warmth — each performer uncovering fresh, idiosyncratic ways to awaken an old tale for our restless, modern hearts. They play to our weariness with laughter, coaxing joy from every line, finding light in even the smallest turns of phrase.
As Macauley, the magnetic Josh McConville strikes a perfect balance between gruff masculinity and raw vulnerability, allowing us to see both the archetypal Aussie bloke and the tender humanity that quietly resides beneath the façade. The endlessly endearing Ziggy Resnick radiates pure exuberance as Buster, delivering a performance that is both impeccably timed and deeply sensitive — a portrait of a child wise beyond her years.
Jeremy Allen’s production design is elegantly spare, mirroring the harshness and austerity of the Australian outback. His use of gumtrees, at once iconic and nostalgic, evokes a landscape that feels both mythic and deeply personal. Trent Suidgeest’s lighting design is remarkable, seamlessly transforming the stage into a multitude of imagined places while crafting moments of sheer visual poetry that satisfy our longing for beauty. Equally striking is Jessica Dunn’s sound and composition, which capture both the vast, unforgiving sweep of the land and the tender intimacy of this unlikely father and daughter bond. Dunn’s work brims with feeling, but her sentimentality is never cloying; it moves us because it is always saying something true.
In this 2025 reiteration of The Shiralee, are unforgettable encounters with Indigenous and other people of colour, alongside multiple queer identities and unapologetic women of substance. Beneath the lively retelling of a story about familial bonds and traditional maleness lie subtle but profound redefinitions of the marginalised, insisting that we see ourselves not as outsiders but as integral threads woven into the tapestry of the Australian myth, forever reshaping it with our resolute presence and undaunted voices.
Suzy Goes See 