★★★★★
Before Logan St begins, its audience is asked to speak. Across a floor-to-ceiling screen, Uncle Lewis O’Brien and Aunty Lynette Crocker welcome us to Kaurna Yarta. Matt Byrne’s camera moves through the landscape, capturing burbling streams and smoke curling through Country. Together, the audience declares that we have not come with ill intent, but with respect.
It is a Welcome to Country like no other. It also prepares the room for a profoundly moving work about who has been permitted to speak, who was forced to whisper and what Country remembers after archives fall silent.
Logan St is Kaurna and Narungga theatre-maker Jacob Boehme’s first mainstage production as both writer and director. He began with childhood stories about his family home at 31A Logan Street and an Afghan neighbour affectionately remembered as “Goolie with the gold tooth, who made us curries.” Conversations with family and Kaurna Elders, alongside archival research, revealed that this family folklore was part of a largely forgotten Adelaide history.
Kathryn Sproul’s Space Theatre stage is almost bare. Five pomegranates lie upon the ground. A Logan Street sign stands in one corner beside a streetlamp.
A grey-haired Dulcie arrives. Nic Mollison’s lighting and the sound design of Patrick Pages-Oliver and Mick Jackson create a car from headlights, slamming doors and darkness. The stage then slips into 1941.
Three tall screens shaped like mosque windows project translations as Afghan neighbours Goolie and Muhammad argue across a fence. Goolie’s bird has been eating Muhammad’s peppers. Their squabble introduces one of the production’s great strengths: Logan St is consistently funny.
A sixteen-year-old Dulcie enters in pigtails and attempts to steal the pomegranates. Goolie catches her. Their confrontation ends with an agreement that anything growing in the garden is theirs to share. That modest exchange supplies the play’s roots.
Across the following nine years, Dulcie and Goolie share food, stories and cultural knowledge. Scenes jump forward two or three years at a time, allowing their friendship to deepen through accumulated domestic rituals rather than grand declarations.
Alexis West captures teenage Dulcie’s mannerisms beautifully. She combines adolescent cheek with a watchfulness learned from living under constant scrutiny. Her body changes as Dulcie ages, but the spark remains.
Ali Ammouchi gives Goolie warmth, pride and comic precision. His conversations with West have the loose rhythms of people who have spent years wandering into each other’s kitchens. Their affection feels lived rather than performed.
Dulcie knows why Goolie’s tomatoes will not grow in the swampy soil. The knowledge came from her mother and from generations of relationship with the land. Later, she explains that First Nations people understood how copper sulfate could turn a flame green long before Western scientists claimed the discovery.
Mollison bathes her face in green light as the campfire changes colour. The effect is simple and sacred. It also carries an ache. Dulcie wanted to become a scientist, but was removed from school before that future could take shape.
The play repeatedly returns to the kitchen. Goolie chops carrots, peels potatoes and plans the feast that will follow Eid at the mosque. Nothing is mimed into emptiness. Knives meet boards and vegetables fill pots.
That naturalism makes the angrier moments dangerous. When tins and spoons fly, their clang cuts through the theatre with the force of a domestic rupture.
Food becomes an offering of trust. As Goolie prepares the Afghan dessert shirpera, the theatre fills with rosewater. Audience members receive a taste after the performance. Hospitality has already crossed the fence, passed between cultures and finally reached the stalls.
The friendship also reveals how differently Australia distributed oppression. Goolie has endured racism and exclusion despite spending more than 50 years in the country he helped build. Yet he can still speak his language across the fence. Dulcie must whisper the songs taught by her mother.
She needs an exemption certificate to work. The document demands that she surrender her culture and identity in exchange for conditional participation in settler society. Goolie is appalled.
Logan St refuses to flatten their experiences into an easy equivalence. Afghan cameleers and their families were treated as second-class citizens. First Nations people were denied recognition as citizens of their own land.
The domestic story is interrupted by passages from the early colonial period. West also inhabits Munarto, while Aviana (Avi) Daveson appears as young Munarto on film. These sequences abandon the kitchen’s naturalism for a more stylised collision of performance, music and colonial art.
Munarto moves before paintings of beautiful coastlines and apparently untouched landscapes. These works presented colonisation without its bodies, violence or grief. Boehme superimposes a Kaurna woman upon them, restoring a presence that the settler image had airbrushed away.
Sonya Rankine’s exquisite songs give these passages their spiritual charge. Dale Cornelius’ music moves between Kaurna and Afghan cultural worlds without treating either as decorative atmosphere. Goolie’s prayers are framed by light with the same reverence given to Dulcie’s campfire and Munarto’s songs.
The relationship between Munarto’s story and the action on Logan Street is initially opaque. At times, the ambiguity threatens to loosen the play’s emotional grip. Boehme deliberately withholds the connection, however, allowing the audience to understand it when Goolie does. At the climax, the timelines suddenly align. The history that had appeared fragmented becomes devastatingly clear.
Boehme has spent 25 years working across dance, puppetry and visual theatre. His experience with movement, screens and music is woven seamlessly into this first mainstage text. The projected past and naturalistic present speak different theatrical languages, yet eventually tell the same story.
The work is also unmistakably South Australian. Grote Street and Chinatown enter the conversation. Goolie knows which trader sells the best ginger and which suburbs hawk particular wares during the war; you go to Parkside for the chocolate. Historic fires are recalled through the people who observed them. Adelaide’s history emerges through shopping, cooking, labour and neighbourhood gossip.
These details draw the audience closer to the ground beneath the city. Streets crossed every day acquire other lives.
The final song is sung loudly, passionately and without apology. After 80 minutes of hearing what Dulcie had to whisper, its volume is overwhelming. Outside, rosewater dances on the tongue. Logan Street no longer sounds like an ordinary Adelaide address.
Logan St is presented by State Theatre Company South Australia and runs to 8 August at the Space Theatre. Adelaide Festival Centre, King William Street Adelaide SA 5000.
Tickets: https://my.statetheatrecompany.com.au/overview/logan-st
Website: https://statetheatrecompany.com.au/shows/logan-st/
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Photo credits: Matt Byrne
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