Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of WA
August 18, 2018

The break-up of NASA’s Skylab space station as it fell through the atmosphere and across large expanses of south western Australia was one of the great media events of the 1970s. Like playwright Melodie Reynolds-Diarra, I too switched between ABC’s screening of the cult children’s television show Monkey Magic to hear where the next fragment of Skylab might show up. Skylab stories still make for a good yarn today, and the topic has all the makings of a great piece of theatre. Reynolds-Diarra’s decision to cast her skyward-gazing protagonists as a financially challenged Indigenous family further opens up rich possibilities for reading the descent of Skylab as a metaphor for the Australian colonial experience and the Aborigines’ points of view.

Gary Cooper and Liani Dalgetty. Photograph © Dana Weeks

These are the evocative themes which Reynolds-Diarra and director Kyle Morrison have to work with, and while the script has undergone considerable dramaturgical development since appearing at the 2015 Yellamundie National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Playwriting Festival, the current version from Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company and Black Swan State Theatre Company is still something of a...