★★★★½
Jane Harrison’s Bennelong in London, directed by Ian Michael in its world premiere at Sydney Theatre Company, is a haunting, vital piece of truth-telling. It takes history off the museum walls and asks us to feel it in our bones.
In a cosy living room, actor Sebastian Anderson (Guy Simon) is preparing to self-tape for an audition as Woollarawarre Bennelong, the Wangal man, diplomat and much-celebrated Aboriginal figure.
In a desperate attempt to inhabit the role, Sebastian unwittingly invokes the spirit of Bennelong (Googoorewon Knox) into his living room. What follows is a conversation that slides back and forth through timelines. Sebastian absorbs Bennelong’s experience, grappling across a gulf of centuries that generates its own misunderstandings, friction, and revelations.
Harrison’s narrative device of bringing a historical figure from the beginning of colonisation into a modern-day living room is truly inventive and engaging. What if you could learn through a conversation across centuries, rather than books that carry bias and all manner of inaccuracy and omission? What begins as audition prep becomes a multilayered narrative that builds to something arresting and profound.
Bennelong walking into a 2026 living room calls up so much for all of us. It’s jarring and immediate. It reminds us that the land we have built our comfortable lives on was stolen from a people who cared for and understood it deeply.
Harrison’s script strikes a balance between the intellectual and the visceral. It doesn’t romanticise Bennelong but layers him with real complexity. He’s an emissary and prisoner, diplomat and so-called savage, and as he says, “I’m a devil and a saint.”
The writing is illuminating and incisive, offering an education that cuts to the bone. This play doesn’t need all the gimmicks, the elaborate stage changes and large cast. It works so well in its simplicity, letting the writing and actors drive the narrative.
Ian Michael’s direction is expert-handed, gliding us between timelines and locations. Guy Simon is a nimble actor who leads the story together with Googoorewon Knox, taking us from the living room to the shores of the first landing on Bennelong Point, and back again, then aboard the colonial ships sailing Bennelong to London, and into Governor Arthur Phillip’s offices.
Trent Suidgeest’s lighting is rich and intimate, working with primary colours to create little pockets of different times and spaces.
James Peter Brown’s score is unimposing but wires into the emotional thread with a fluid beauty. His work is delicate and rousing, building the visceral sensation of the story.
The moments of song are immediately powerful. When Knox plays the clapsticks and sings, it takes a story so complex and full of pain and trauma into embodiment, bypassing the intellect entirely.
Simon is buoyant, sharp and alive as Sebastian. He’s charismatic from the start and sustains that energy throughout, effortlessly taking on various roles and accents, including Bennelong’s wife, Barangaroo.
Knox brings a cheeky innocence to Bennelong but not without fierce authority. He moves from commanding presence to crumbling grief in moments that feel unguarded.
There are moments that are truly blistering in their shocking reality. When the actors reenact the capturing of Bennelong and his people onto the ship, with ropes around their necks, the truth we never really contemplate hits home.
Earlier in the piece, the script at times drags with a slightly didactic style and Knox at times runs the risk of staying in the telling with a slight dry detachment. But there’s power in the ancestral energy he invokes, and the actors keep it alive, moving with quick shifts in momentum.
In the words of Walt Whitman, this story contains multitudes. The creatives work in exquisite concert to deliver a piece that’s uncompromising yet tender, allowing these multitudes to speak through dance, music, movement and conversation.
We’ve read about Bennelong in textbooks, seen the documentaries, stared at artefacts in museums pondering, “hmm, that’s interesting.” Bennelong in London takes us beyond the museum stroll, beyond the removed novelty of intellectual understanding, into something that gets into the bones.
It is a visceral awakening that reminds us that what was done in the past doesn’t stay in the past.
Bennelong in London is presented by Sydney Theatre Company and runs to 16 August at Wharf 1 Theatre. Wharf 4/5 Walsh Bay Sydney NSW 2000.
Tickets are available here.
Website: https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/2026/productions/bennelong-in-london
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/sydneytheatreco/
Photo credits: Daniel Boud
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