For an emerging playwright, 20-something Wamba Wamba man Brodie Murray sure is having a great run. His debut work Soul of Possum was lucky enough to bow in an actual theatre with an honest to goodness audience at the Meat Market stables earlier this year, as part of First Nations arts festival Yirramboi. Now his sophomore offering Billy’s Choice pops up in Melbourne Fringe. Only this time it’s not live. The work is one of the small but perfectly formed coterie that made the jump to this year’s online showcase thanks to you know what.
And yet it kinda works in the story’s favour. It is partly set in a Melbourne boarding school that was subject to the city’s extended lockdown in 2020. Murray plays the eponymous Billy, holed up in his boarding school dormitory. His heart is drawn back to Wamba Wamba Country and the guidance of his Uncle Wumyah (Dion Williams), with whom he has a really strong bond. That’s not quite true of his relationship with his dad John (Corey Saylor-Brunskill), a high flying figure in the Koorie Justice sector who isn’t exactly present for Billy. John does not react well to the news that Billy is considering skipping uni.
Further complicating matters, John and Wumyah are estranged, for reasons Billy doesn’t fully understand. Much of the emotional heft of the play centres on the young man caught in the middle, trying to figure out his own path in life while picking at the scab that’s formed between the older men. If we’d gotten to see them on stage together, as directed by the brilliant Rachael Maza, then the complicated intimacy of the piece would have really sung. But here we are in another extended lockdown. As it is, the piece plays out over iPhone conversations. This ad hoc solution, adapted by filmmaker Davide Michielin, stitches solo-shot monologues into a digitally aided dialogue.
Billy’s Choice is, after all, about navigating identity and self-set destiny, all while the three men remain distant from one another, both physically and psychologically. Williams has a lived-in charm that conveys his gentler way of guidance well, with Saylor-Brunskill believably frazzled. His expressive eyebrow work, in particular, signals just how close John is to cracking it. Billy has to walk a fine line between men and the different paths they represent. It’s Murray’s subtle performance that would have benefited most from being staged in-person, but he still holds his own in very different conditions. The play will surely blossom further once we can get back to theatres.
