Gwen in Purgatory

31 July - 19 September

Namatjira

25 September - 7 November

The Bougainville Photoplay Project

9 November - 28 November

The Diary of a Madman

4 December - 6 February

Presented by Company B in association with Malthouse Melbourne

sweet, funny and irresistible The Sydney Morning Herald

A beautiful story told with a directness and simplicity
The Australian

Dallas Winmar (Aliwa!, Company B's 2001 Season) gives us her latest play, a beautiful growing-up story about her grandmother.

Dallas Winmar
Dramaturg Louise Gough

Wesley Enoch

With
Jada Alberts, Jimi Bani, Sibylla Budd, Annie Byron, Russell Dykstra, Roxanne McDonald, David Page, Melodie Reynolds and Miranda Tapsell

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Wesley Enoch staged a reading of part of Dallas Winmar’s new play a few years ago. We only got the first half hour, on a bare stage, but at the end we were uniformly bowled over. As the applause erupted, Stephen Sewell cried out from up the back, “But what happened next?”

Noongar writer Dallas Winmar has a knack for spinning a yarn. her tough, natural sense of humour and compassion rang out clear in Aliwa! at Belvoir St in 2001, and they’re special ingredients once again in Yibiyung.

Yibiyung was Dallas’ grandmother and this is her growing-up story. She was one of hundreds of girls swept up in the forced removals of the 1920s and trained to become model domestic servants. But it’s Yibiyung’s break from this regime and her extraordinary flight across Western Australia which gives her story its rolling, expansive rhythm of survival.

Miranda Tapsell plays Yibiyung. Wesley Enoch directs, and we hope the Belvoir St stage is big enough for what he’s cooking up.

Yibiyung is about finding a way out of centuries-old cycles of anger and despair. As the Army moves into the Northern Territory and Australia lurches into its next phase of paternalism, Yibiyung is a song of hope and change, a celebration of fronting up and finding place and family.