Opera Australia 2024, review: Turning Point: The Death of Dr Duncan

(Photo credit: Keith Saunders)

It felt like a momentous occasion – Opera Australia’s revival of the 2022 Adelaide Festival hit Watershed on Friday 14 June, about the 1972 murder of Adelaide University law lecturer Dr Ian Duncan. This revival at the Sydney Opera House was testament to the work’s success when it was first broadcast. Certainly it had resonated in Adelaide, where the tragic events took place, but how would this work, described as an oratorio by its creators – Brisbane composer Joseph Twist, Sydney and Melbourne librettists Alana Valentine and Christos Tsiolkas, and Sydney director Neil Armfield – fare when transferred to Sydney? Given the size of Sydney’s gay community and the fact that this story looms so large in Australia’s gay rights history, one might expect some bias towards the subject matter. There had been open weeping during the Adelaide performances, and Watershed would receive a standing ovation at its premiere at the Sydney Opera House. Ultimately, everyone can find their own touching moment in this work.

“Watershed” is about the drowning of Dr Duncan in Adelaide’s Torrens River, whose banks were a well-known “gay district” in the 1970s. According to the court report, the murder was committed by “unknown persons,” but for a long time it was assumed that they were members of the South Australian police. Soon after Duncan’s murder, Adelaide’s Morning Paper published The advertiser published an editorial entitled “Legalize Homosexuality.” The controversy eventually led to a government led by progressive hero Don Dunstan passing the first law in Australia decriminalizing homosexual acts in 1975. Thus, Dr Duncan’s murder can be seen as a turning point in Australian politics.

What kind of opera or oratorio would this material produce? In any case, it was one that evoked memories and sparked extra-musical interest. Facebook was filled with recollections from people who were in Adelaide at the time and whose lives were touched by the event. A timeline published in the program booklet accompanying an article by historian Tim Reeves was chilling in its real-world resonance: “1973, 19 September: Peter Duncan (later Attorney-General) introduces a dramatically amended 1973 Bill in the House of Representatives; 21 November: The Bill fails in the Legislative Council by one vote…” The librettists testified in their program note to having experienced homophobia. Emotionally charged, then, even before the show began! But what promised to be an emotional experience also turned out to be a very effective piece of theatre – an oratorio, claim the creators, but one enlivened by intelligent stage movements and sufficiently informative rear projections. These were newspaper reports and images of the innocuous scene – the river bank where the events took place – to avoid any sense of concert-like static. The piece traversed the spectrum from musical theater to opera with incredible success. The choreographer was Lewis Major and the video designer Sean Bacon. The director of “Watershed” was Neil Armfield, whose work has been reviewed by OperaWire before – Pinchgut Opera’s “Platée” in 2021 and the Met’s production of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet” in 2022.

“Watershed” benefited primarily from an engaging, ear-splitting score and a powerful libretto that was by turns raucous and uplifting. Composer Joseph Twist’s works have been performed by Moby, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chanticleer and the Wiggles, among others. His music, which won the 2013 ASCAP Jimmy van Heusen Award, was immediately appealing and suited to any occasion. He acknowledges the influence — “echoes” — of Britten, Bach, Adams and Sondheim. I thought I heard Bernstein and Reich in it, too. But what mattered was that the music served the drama and was, frankly, impressive at discovering music even in prose — a marimba pattern maintaining tension beneath the dry words of a coroner, for example — but also melodic form carved out of prose when sung.

Part of the score’s success lay in its constantly refreshing metric modulations, expertly handled by conductor Brett Weymark. It was as if Twist had already attuned his ears to the track structure of a CD being played, guaranteeing the audience an impression of the music to take away with them. It’s worth noting that Twist was described in the programme as “composer and orchestrator”, a sign of the range of interests he could coax out of an ensemble consisting of just a small number of string players, two percussionists, a keyboardist and a guitarist. The powerful text by playwright Alana Valentine and novelist Christos Tsiolkas (author of “The Slap”) was intended to be “radiant” – hence perhaps the “oratorio” designation – and it achieved this while being at times blunt and sharply realistic. The performance came with a language warning, but some of the old Australian expressions like “Too right” – which is (or was) used by a certain generation of Australians – were just moving. Amazing how a word like “faggot” can take us back to the 1970s and the hostility of pre-Dunstan Australia. Perhaps it’s not as common today?

One of the oratorio’s most striking features was the ease with which the work was able to move between opera and musical theatre through well-judged transitions between speech, dialogue, arias and choruses. This perhaps suggested that these two genres are realistically points on the same continuum. The musical tension and release enriched a sometimes straightforward, documentary retelling of events. The latter is evident, for example, when the narrator declares, “Duncan is not in the water yet…”

Watershed is ostensibly an oratorio, the dramatic form usually performed without stage movement: but movement enlivened this space. Dancer Macon Escobal Riley, who portrays the drowning man, and a narrator – the lost boy – played by actor and musical artist Tomáš Kantor, moved freely across the stage. So did fresh-voiced tenor Mark Oates as Duncan/Dunstan, and authoritative baritone Pelham Andrews as whistleblower and moral guardian Mick O’Shea/policeman/lawyer. The drowning man waddling through a ditch onstage provided one of the most radiant moments in the entire work. At the end, the ripples created by Riley’s movement as he was pulled from the water were reflected on the proscenium, leaving us all pensive as we realized that he and Kantor had kissed – finally and definitively. The singers seemed to be equipped with only lightweight microphones, allowing them to reproduce the work’s occasional dialogue clearly and distinctly without making anything seem forced.

Some of the most poignant moments came from the choir, rehearsed by Paul Fitzsimon and Michael Curtain. Particularly poignant was the sequence at the beginning of the show in which the date of Dr Duncan’s drowning is given – May 10, 1972 – and the choir members interject other dates – presumably examples of other insults. But the choir also played – sometimes with mocking, affinity gestures – and had some of the most biting lines, including presumably the perpetrators’ denials: “We thought all faggots swim / No homos in the ark.” Twist’s choral writing seemed particularly rich and varied. “I would never call myself a homosexual,” sings Oates, and two soloists from the choir respond: “But no priest would give you communion.” Oratorio, then, but an element of rebuke of traditional Christianity. There was even an acknowledgement of the Aboriginal owners of the lands around the Torrens River – the use of the river’s traditional name, ‘Karrawirra Parri’ – which seems to be linked to the statement that ‘there is room for your name in our country’. The text is apt, and other well-known Adelaide place names such as Gawler and Semaphore are also mentioned.

A documentary structure forced the makers to continue after the Act had been passed, as in real life there had been a New Scotland Yard investigation which concluded there were insufficient grounds for prosecution. Here there was a risk of disillusionment. But individual lines towards the end, arguably the most moving in the entire work, extended the significance of Dr Duncan’s murder and the subsequent change in public policy in South Australia to the wider public: “I am the archivist who read your case…” and demonstrated the power of the colloquial rhyme: “I am the priest who is no longer pious / I am the police diver who pulled out your body.”

A broad appeal could come at just the right time. As Armfield says in his program note, “The forces of backlash are gathering – we wonder how far this country is from institutionalized homophobia, despite marriage equality and various state recognitions of equal rights.” Twist hopes in his program note that “the diversity and accessibility of the music of ‘Watershed’ will enable future performances by choirs of all kinds, so that we can continue to share in this important story that touches us all.” That wish should be granted.