The first time many of us encountered actress Kerry Armstrong was in the TV soap opera, Prisoner: Cell Block H, where she played innocent 21-year-old inmate Lynn Warner, falsely convicted of infanticide.
After a stellar career of 40+ years, this award-winning actress is now making her debut on the Sydney Theatre Company stage as ‘Floss’, local nurse and wife of farmer ‘Ray’ (Colin Friels), both of them around retirement age.
Ray and Floss have been together for decades and have weathered the vagaries of Australian farming like millions of others before them. This time however, the drought they’re experiencing is unprecedented and when the rain finally comes, it too, brings its own problems…
Despite using just a single set of the farmstead’s country kitchen, Friels in particular manages to evoke in our imagination the battle-hardened landscape surrounding them and through effective sound and lighting design, both the beauty and the pathos of the story is portrayed.
Love for the land and each other
Friels and Armstrong – veterans as they are of Australian stage and screen – are a credible long-married couple, particularly Friels with his lanky figure and a country drawl as baked-on as his well- worn jeans.
There are other minor characters but most of the time, it is simply Floss and Ray against the world, propping each other up in the face of climate disaster, inhospitable neighbours and an uncertain future. And they slip into character as easily as the oilskins hanging up on the wall in the kitchen.
But when, inevitably, tragedy strikes, I was not as moved as I wanted to be. Perhaps the script, with its often deliberately repetitive, often mundane exchanges between Floss and Ray did not quite draw me in enough to feel the blow to their bond.
Despite this, the performances are uniformly excellent, particularly Friels, who is virtually flawless. As he says of the play: “It’s quintessentially an Australian play about connection to a soulmate;
before that, to a love of the land, and what you do and where you belong… where human nature meets the natural world.”
Into The Shimmering World
Sydney Theatre Company
Until 19 May, 2024
