The Secret River

With Sydney Theatre Company’s season revival of The Secret River just days away, the cast and crew have battened down for one of the most anticipated productions in recent memory. The reason behind this is simple: with a lineage bestowed with six Helpmann Awards, including both Best Play and Direction, the bar has been set at a formidable height. Many still recall Dean’s previous turn as 18th century convict William Thornhill, and with Neil Armfield also returning to the director’s chair, we have all the ingredients to witness another triumph.

“It’s a pretty arduous rehearsal period, really,” Dean chuckles, “because the whole thing has a live music element, it has a huge cast, we’re doing lots of runs. But it means that we’re in really great shape.”

Dean coughs and clears his throat (it is early Monday morning, and his voice doesn’t quite sound like it is accustomed to speaking just yet). These days there is an impressive cast of characters stretching behind him, from Thornhill to Underbelly to his AACTA-winning role in 2002’s Walking On Water. Yet Thornhill remains unique; the one character he has found himself evoking a second time, drawn to a life not all that distant from our own.

“I think Thornhill’s is an interesting, but still very common story from our history,” says Dean. “Thornhill is a guy who has come from the most horrible place on Earth, the lowest of the low in London, desperately starving and trying to look after his family. He stole something – he wasn’t like a career crim or anything, but gets plonked on a boat, comes over here in godawful conditions, lands, and like so many of them, would have been struck by the beauty of the place, and how alien that must have felt.

“Thornhill’s story is about a man’s dream of creating a new life. There’s a line that Kate Grenville wrote, which is in Andrew [Bovell]’s adaptation, that says Thornhill’s story was just a blank page on which he might write a new life. That’s the point where this play leaps off, and so for a modern audience, it’s a play about that first contact, and about how when that contact happened, communication just fell apart.

“I feel we have so much to do, so much to learn in Australia,” Dean adds. “We are not the perpetrators, we’re not the victims, but we are the generations that have come from that, and I feel if we can look back with honesty, with truth, perhaps acceptance can come from that.”

Though the story has its roots in real local history (the Hawkesbury River is but an hour north of the theatre itself), Grenville’s celebrated tale of European colonisers and indigenous communities is nevertheless a fiction. Born of another project altogether – an attempt to research her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, whose eponymous township still stands – it conjures a striking picture of early White Australia, and the fear and desperation that fuelled so many early encounters with the local Aboriginal peoples.

“Kate has written a fictitious tale based around a lot of research, trying to find the Wiseman story,” says Dean. “That was certainly the launch pad for this. Within that, one of the great things about this production was researching the Dharug language, the language of the Hawkesbury mob. So the interactions between the Thornhills and the Dharug tribe is in this language, so it’s a story that needs to be told from both sides. I feel that Andrew has done a really wonderful adaptation of Kate’s book; Iain Grandage has done some amazing live music, which is played by the actors during the performance. It adds a whole other element. When you come to see it, you’ll be struck by this giant white ironbark stage, this open white stage, and throughout the performance there are no tricks, it’s really just a bunch of actors telling their story. I think it makes this really accessible. I believe we’re showing the heart and soul of both sides to this.”

The Secret River will also showcase a very meaningful facet of Dean’s acting career. The opportunity to revisit a former character is not one offered to many performers, and he sounds genuinely excited to show audiences precisely what kind of transformations a role might undertake across a span of years. He will still, first and foremost, remain William Thornhill; but a Thornhill perhaps more rooted in this remarkable story.

“It’s quite a fascinating thing, to get the chance to re-approach this world. After I did the first production I became quite fascinated with the Hawkesbury and have been up there quite a number of times now. It was three years ago, long enough to be a dream, not enough to be something we’re trying to quickly replicate.

“There’s a new cast, which brings new ideas. It’s definitely one of the biggest challenges I’ve had as an actor, but I’m really thrilled.

“I’m also really stoked that we’re going to Brisbane and Melbourne with it, that other states get to see this story. I think it’s a very important time in our country to tell this story, and that’s what we’re here to do in the arts: present these stories. When you look back at some of these convicts and where they came from, you find some amazing stories. I really encourage people to look into where they came from.”