To celebrate 30 years since its initial foundation as a Noongar youth theatre group, Yirra Yaakin offered a revue style selection of scenes from previous works, directed by Maitland Schnaars, showcasing the diversity of the company’s repertoire.

It was great to see excerpts from my own favourites, as well as examples of the company’s work in comedies of manners, social realist commentary, and Australian First Nations language performances.

Calen Tassone in So Long Suckers. Photo @ Dana Weeks

Schnaars’ opened with Sally Morgan’s and David Milroy’s Cruel Wild Woman (1999), the scene being a two hander between the unlikely couple played by Bobbi Henry and Calen Tassone, moving between Henry relentlessly critiquing Tassone for being such a no hoper, and Tassone going on amusing flights of fancy and diatribes against the grotesque state of Australian race relations, with then Prime Minister “Little Johnny Howard” refusing an apology at the same time as racist scaremonger Pauline Hanson came onto the scene.

The use of a domestic setting for knockabout social critique directed straight at the audience evoked the mood of which much early Australian Aboriginal theatre.

More striking was the excerpt from the superb...