Seven Sisters, WA Youth Theatre Company
New Fortune Theatre UWA, 10 February 2023

Since the beginning of human thought we have gazed at the stars in wonder. It’s almost impossible to imagine being confronted by the overwhelming spectacle of the heavens before there was light pollution, and without scientific observation, to explain their mysteries.

That wonder translated into mythology, storytelling and religion, and certain stars and star clusters assumed particular significance among widely different and geographically distant peoples.

The Seven Sisters (in Greek The Pleiades, in Japan Subaru, among countless other names in other places) is one of the most prominent stellar constellations, and it was recognised for millennia in the culture and languages of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples as they observed it in the northern skies.

WA Youth Theatre Company (WAYTCO) has used the Seven Sisters, and the great theatre of the stars, as the jumping off point for an exploration of the thoughts of diverse young people in their uncertain, challenging world, and the result is a gentle, caring work with many insights and rewards.

A dozen young people gather around a campfire under the stars to party and talk about the challenges they face as they navigate the pathway to adulthood. The group contains a variety of ethnicities, genders, sexualities, abilities and life experiences, but all tell stories of losing and not finding, of, as one puts it, “walking a path I have not been shown”.

Each of their stories relates to the stars directly or indirectly, from the touching but gruesome Greek myth of the nymph Pleione, mother of the seven sisters, and the Titan Atlas, to the emblematic status of the stars in comparison to the insignificance and transience of humankind.

The co-directors, Cezera Critti-Schnaars and WAYTCO artistic director James Berlyn, and the cast have dealt splendidly with the challenges of mounting a production in the New Fortune, the recreation of the famous Elizabethan Theatre (in truth they don’t attempt to use its levels and balconies, staging all the action on its thrust stage and, briefly, in the pit, but that’s understandable given that the work is touring to three other venues during its Perth Festival season.)

They use the simple, effective device of strings of party lights as starry crowns for the actors and as a crackling campfire around which the cast tell their stories, supported by a sweetly unobtrusive sound bed by the composer Levi Widnall.

Some stories are clearly intensely personal, others representative of their generation, one – a wildly entertaining parody of the “wellness” industry – is largely for comic relief.

Above, beneath and around them all are the wise words of Seven Sisters’ cultural mentor Roma Yibiyung Windmar: “The stars belong to no-one”.

It’s that insight Critti-Schnaars and Berlyn have had their charges bring to these stories, themselves carriers of new experiences and wisdom that will, in time, pass down through generations and ages under those same constant stars.

Seven Sisters ends with a transcendent moment as the cast spin out their strings of starlight and join in “Ngala Djinda”, a gorgeous and uplifting Noongar song by Kobi Morrison and Levi Widnall. It’s a fitting end to a story – like so much of WAYTCO’s impressive and important work – with much to show us.

Seven Sisters tours to Fremantle Arts Centre Inner Courtyard, 17-18 February, Subiaco Arts Centre Amphitheatre 24-25 February and the State Theatre Centre of WA Courtyard 3-4 March 2023.

Pictured top: Young performers share their stories of ‘walking a path [they] have not been shown’, with gentle compassion. Photo: Jess Wyld