The Cockatoos | State Theatre Centre | Until Nov 29th | ★ ★ ★ ★ 

It is a rare treat in our local theatre scene to see a work performed for a second time, so rarely do we get to see a production be restaged, reimagined, reinterpreted and shown for a second time.  

Five years ago director Andrew Hale presented an acclaimed season of The Cockatoos at The Blue Room. His adaptation of Patrick White’s short story about the characters living on a suburban street in the 1970s.

Here we get to see the same adaptation, but presented at a different level, working with the WA Youth Theatre company gives Hale a bigger cast, and bigger stage, and it makes a significant difference.

Under the guidance of Artistic Director James Berlyn WAYTCo has presented a series of ambitious and innovative theatre works. Here Berlyn draws on his own dance background, working alongside Hale to create a theatrical piece that blurs the lines between physical theatre, spoken word and performance.

With an expanded cast of twelve performers we get a chorus of performers delivering the snappy lines as nine year old boy Tim sneaks out of his house to spend a night in the park, observing the neighbourhood around him. Just as the play follows a growing chattering of cockatoos, here we have a flock of performers on stage.

While it can be challenging to see adults play children, this young cast face the double challenge of being slightly too old to convincingly be a nine year old, and simultaneously looking too young to play the older characters. They do an admirable job, and some performers are very convincing portraying people decades older than they are.

As where the original production was close and intimate in The Blue Room’s tiny performance space, here the stage is vast, a large white canvas to play with shadows and light, a space where performers can run and leap and dive and roll. The syncopated language of the script perfectly matched with movement and sound.

Aided by some brilliant costuming peppered with wide flares and shorts with long socks, we are transported back to Australian suburbia of the 1970s. Back to time where if you wanted to make a phone call you needed to find a phone box, and the shops were only opening on Saturdays until lunch time.

I’m not sure if there’s a terms that describes the theatrical equivalent of an ASMR YouTube video, but The Cockatoos is it. In recently times online video creators have tapped into phenomena of autonomous sensory meridian response, creating sounds that make the hair on the back of your neck stick up, YouTube is littered with videos of people whispering or eating crunchy foods close to the microphone.

In this production papers are scrunched, seeds skittle across the stage, and then are crunched underfoot, swings whoosh through the air, and there’s a cacophony of taps, bangs and scrunches. It’ll either give you a full sensory theatre experience, or possibly drive you mad in a spine tickling way.

There is an odd moment in this performance where two characters break into song, I love musicals as much as the next guy who has Les Miserables, Oliver and The Sound of Music on the ‘most played’ list on his iPod, but here this musical interlude seemed unnecessary to the storytelling.

What does shine through is the confident and faultless performances of the young actors in this work, as always WAYTCO is showing us the actors who will hopefully appear regularly on our stages in years to come.

The Cockatoos is at the State Theatre Centre until Friday 29th November.