Kelly himself remains something of a floating signifier – one perhaps best captured in art by the empty letterbox of his head in the iconic paintings by Sidney Nolan. The armour is also a mask, perhaps even one with nothing behind it. Broadly speaking, there are two traditions, one of which sentimentalises and mythologises Kelly as a working-class underdog, Irish rebel, Robin Hood, proto-revolutionary, and martyr, framed and persecuted by the police and authorities, and betrayed at Glenrowan by the Judas-figure of Thomas Curnow; while the other (less popular) view sees him as murderous thug. In the language of contemporary psychology, he might be diagnosed as suffering from a classic case of narcissistic or even anti-social personality disorder, with a fair dose of toxic masculinity (or male hysteria) thrown in. If he were active today he would probably be labelled as a terrorist; his predilection for taking hostages and the lack of clarity in his objectives (especially at Glenrowan but also in his letters and pronouncements) bear more than a passing resemblance to Man Haron Monis.

As such, he makes a potentially interesting figure in terms of revisionist cultural history, and Peter Goldsworthy’s witty libretto goes some way towards exploring this by making the opera ‘a three-act pub-crawl’ (as he says in his program note) set mostly in the hotels at Euroa, Jerilderie, and Glenrowan, where Kelly took hostages, wrote his famous letters of self-justification, and was finally besieged and captured; it might be even called a hostage or siege-drama along the lines of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (which also used the genre to explore themes of masculinity and authority).

Sam Dundas as Ned Kelly in Ned Kelly (photograph by Toni Wilkinson)

The opera is framed in terms of Kelly’s relationship with his mother, who reflects on herself and her son in the opening and closing arias and in two intermezzos between the acts, textually and musically adapted from the old bushranger ballad of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. It also flirts with the twin themes of gender and disguise in the form of Dan Kelly’s occasional transvestism, as well as the propensity to masquerade displayed by Kelly and other gang members, which included women’s dresses, police uniforms, a suit of leather Chinese armour, and, finally, the ploughshares hammered into breastplates and worn at Glenrowan.

More profoundly, the opera probes the moral ambiguity of Kelly’s crimes and punishment by staging alternative accounts of his shooting of policemen at Stringybark Creek as well as of the arrest of his mother at their homestead in Greta and her subsequent imprisonment (which, Kelly claimed, was the motivation for his subsequent actions). The Stringybark Creek scene was, for me, the most effective moment in the show, not least because of its use of stillness and silence (broken only by the score’s use of sporadic bell-bird-like whistling to heighten the tension).

Goldsworthy’s libretto is generally well supported by Luke Styles’s eclectic score, which ranges from folk music to more typically twentieth-century operatic influences like Alban Berg and Benjamin Britten (with perhaps the occasional reference to Richard Meale’s iconic Voss). A Britten-like chamber orchestra of fine classical musicians is ably conducted by Lost & Found’s Artistic Director (and recently appointed Music Director at WA Opera), Chris van Tuinen, and supplemented by a small folk-band of two acoustic guitarists and a large onstage community choir. However, I couldn’t help feeling that the heavy-handedness of the score was at odds with the light touch of the libretto, and that the marriage of modernist mélange and bush ballads (or indeed international opera singers and local community choir) didn’t quite come off.

The opera was totally let down by the production – in particular, the direction and choice of location in a huge abandoned timber-mill in Jarrahdale. Unlike Lost & Found’s other site-specific productions (including, most recently, a wonderful staging of Charpentier’s Actéon in and around a swimming pool), this setting had no apparent relevance to the work itself, apart from the vaguest and most clichéd notions of ‘heritage’ or ‘the bush’; a pub would have been a much more obvious and effective location. More critically, the acoustics, architecture, and layout of the space meant that the libretto was largely incomprehensible to most of the audience (I requested and read a copy afterwards).

Fiona Campbell as Ellen Kelly and cast in Ned Kelly (photograph by Toni Wilkinson)

Even more incomprehensibly, there were no surtitles (surely standard practice now for any opera, in any opera house and any language). Perhaps this was an aesthetic decision, or perhaps a logistical or budgetary one; in any case, it killed any chance the work had of communicating itself to most of the audience, as we were seated in a huge tiered block, and most of us were a long way from the action, which took place across a vast receding space. To make things worse, much of it was poorly lit, including the singer’s faces. The chorus, during the crucial narrative intermezzos, were positioned in a line at the back of the space in semi-darkness. Fine singing from the whole cast, especially Fiona Campbell as Ellen and Pia Harris as Kate Kelly, and Adrian Tamburini as Joe Byrne, couldn’t compensate for these fatal handicaps. As my companion observed afterwards, after a few minutes of straining to hear the words he gave up, and then spent the next ninety minutes going through the stages of grieving over and over again.

Other inept staging and directorial decisions only added to our woes. There are only so many times that guns can be pointed and waved around (without being fired) – while the chorus in the role of hostages sits around apparently unaffected – before suspension of disbelief is itself indefinitely suspended. Singers stood half-facing and singing at each other at amateurish angles, or wandered upstage or offstage to change costume during the scenes, sometimes in full view of the audience, sometimes not, without apparent rhyme or reason. During the climactic siege, Kelly donned his armour and then walked out of the venue completely to face the police, before inexplicably re-entering in order to be shot. Prior to this, an extended barn dance by the gang and hostages was repeatedly but ineffectually interrupted by Kelly, once again waving his gun and making largely inaudible threats, while a seated chorus of onlookers seemed unsure whether to clap along audibly or in mime.

The placement of the orchestra and bush-band upstage and to the side of the action didn’t help either – visually or acoustically – but only added to our general sense of distance and disengagement from the music and the action. Once again, seating the audience onstage as fellow hostages (ideally in an actual pub setting) would have brought us physically and emotionally closer to the musicians and the singers, who could then have addressed and affected us more directly and even viscerally. Instead, it was only in an aesthetic sense that we were held hostage to the experience.

In sum, Styles and Goldsworthy’s opera deserves another go, whether in a pub or an actual theatre, and with a fresh director at the helm. Goldsworthy mentions in the program note that he was inspired by Jacqui Stockdale’s remarkable photographic work Historia, featuring a topless female Ned Kelly (the image is also somewhat misleadingly used as the marketing image for the show); and harking back to Lost & Found’s splendid Actéon, I would have loved to see Ned Kelly staged as a queer baroque pastorale, perhaps with the role of Ned sung by a countertenor or even a female soprano. Certainly, something needs to be done to bring the work – and Ned Kelly himself – kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

Ned Kelly was performed by Lost & Found at the Perth Festival 15–19 February 2019. Performance attended: February 19. 

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