Theatre / “Good Works”, Mill Theatre. At Mill Theatre, until August 12. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

THE Mill Theatre is an exciting and unusual space  and director Julian Meyrick, working with a powerful cast, an emotive abstract set design (Kathleen Kershaw), imaginative lighting (Jennifer Wright) and atmospheric sound (Damien Ashcroft)  wrings the most out of a tense tale full of violence but also full of the potential for love. 

Nick Enright’s “Good Works” is a play which will send a shiver through anyone who was born in the ’40s or ’50s. It’s heavy with the attitudes and mores of the war and afterwards and the effects they had on lives.

This is in a time when gay relationships were not officially recognised, when unmarried mothers carried great stigma, when corporal punishment in schools for boys in particular was accepted and when the Catholic Church was powerful in its control over how Catholic families lived their lives.

It’s complex in its storyline with dizzying and atmospheric switches of time and place but a strong cast holds it all together, playing multiple parts with skill and style aided by Belynda Buck’s choreography.

Outspoken and outgoing Rita (Adele Querol) and the more gentle and conformist Mary Margaret (Lexi Sekuless) grow up in a Catholic orphanage in what seems to be  a country town by a river, products of a society where birth control was pretty well unobtainable and single mothers stigmatised. Mary is being groomed by the nuns for an advantageous marriage. Rita refuses to be pushed around and her relationships are much more chaotic.

It is her son Shane (Martin Everett) who becomes more than close to Mary’s music playing son Tim (Oliver Bailey). Their growing relationship has the potential for a dark outcome.

Querol and Sekuless convince as the two central women, particularly as they age and their experience of life deepens. Helen McFarlane plays with empathy a range of older women including the nun who teaches Mary to conform but has no luck with Rita, and Mrs Cameron, mother of Mary’s husband and herself a product of the orphanage’s training.

Meanwhile Catholic education in the form of the scornful Brother Clement (Neil Pigot) is having its way with the two boys. Bailey’s Tim is imaginative, likeable and sensitive but becomes Brother Clement’s target. A dangerous gift from Shane’s war damaged father Neil (Everett) leads to a terrible outcome.

Everett and Bailey give deeply sensitive performances as the two friends, from childhood to adulthood. But the most disturbing actor on stage has to be the dark presence of Pigot in all his roles, especially when he is Brother Clement, unleashing the fear of the strap in a school.

Not to be missed by lovers of Australian drama.