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Canberra Today 15°/17° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Derek, the man of many parts

Actor Derek Lynch in a scene from “Namatjira”.

DEREK Lynch knows just what tough work it is being an actor.

In the coming production of “Namatjira”, he’s just one of two actors and plays between 12 and 14 (so many he can’t quite remember) characters.

The 24-year-old actor is a descendant of the famous artist who was, with his wife, the first Aboriginal to be granted Australian citizenship and who, after being jailed for supplying liquor to his family, died in misery in 1959.

He doesn’t get to play his celebrated ancestor – that honour goes to Trevor Jamieson. But he does get to play a variety of personalities and to inject a note of satirical humour and warmth into this production by Scott Rankin and Wayne Blair.

“I play a soldier, a cowboy and kids at school”. Lynch also plays “a Melbourne society lady,” Albert’s wife Rubina and the Queen, in a series of hilarious impersonations that have seen him praised by one interstate critic as being a “sharp drag artist.”

Jamieson also does a few characters, but not as many as Lynch. One of the unusual features of the production, written by Scott Rankin in consultation with the Namatjira family, he said, was the creation of a huge chalk landscape on an upstage wall. As the show continues, artists, many of them relatives of

Namatjira, add detail, so that “by the show’s end, the landscape is also complete.”

Added to this, a portraitist appears on stage painting Jamieson.

Lynch says that during the tour, the painters will “come and go”, but the role of painter was created by Robert Hannaford, and he will appear in Canberra.

Indeed, the National Gallery of Australia is planning a forum (at 2pm on September 13) with Hannaford and contemporary artists from Hermannsburg, near Alice Springs, where Namatjira grew up.

Chapman Gallery will also stage an exhibition of Hermannsburg watercolours, some of which will hang in the Canberra Theatre Centre foyer.

Big hART’s “Namatjira”, The Playhouse, September 14 to 17. Bookings to 6275 2700 or canberratheatrecentre.com.au

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Ian Meikle, editor

Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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