Review: All His Beloved Children is a sermon in mythmaking
Written by Frieda Lee, directed by Amelia Burke
Review by Charlotte Smee
Trying to understand something as large and terrifying as the universe is a ridiculous task. Religions, institutions, and cultural groups worldwide have attempted to remedy this by telling creation myths that theorise where we might have come from. Some stories say we came from nothing, others say we came from some kind of parent, and still others theorise that we came from a brother who hit his sister with a fish and told her to multiply.
Religion and mythmaking, like theatre, is not an individual act but a communal one. So what better way to explore both than through a play?
Playwright Frieda Lee weaves some of these myths together to create her own myth of sorts, or perhaps more of a reflection on the ridiculousness of the task those myths are trying to achieve. That myth is the darkly comedic All His Beloved Children, which leans into the violence, strangeness and incest of old to create a wild ride into our shared obsessions with the didactic and dramatic. Isis (goddess of love, healing, fertility, magic and the moon, played by Melissa Gan) is married to Habil (as he is known in the Qur’an, or Abel in the Hebrew Bible). Her younger sister Yamuna (the Hindu river goddess, played by Kavina Shah) lies dead on their kitchen table, much to their young son Achimi’s dismay (the buffalo god of the Kabyle people, played by Lukas Radovich).
Things go even more awry when Yamuna’s unhappy husband Cain arrives (son of Adam and Eve, brother to Abel, played by Tel Benjamin). From the beginning, the play is heavy with symbolism and references to a wide range of myths and religions, but the action is fast-paced and clever enough to keep you guessing until the end, and even afterwards. Helpfully, Amelia Burke directs an increasingly weird ensemble of actors that inhabit their mythical selves with varying levels of comfort. Radovich as Achimi is a highlight as the constantly masturbating and somehow still innocent caricature of naivety.
Creation myths and other didactic stories are interesting for a whole host of reasons, a lot of them their very black-and-white approaches to “doing the wrong thing”; whatever that “wrong” thing might be. A lot of the time it’s sex or performing your gender incorrectly, and this play uses the black-and-whiteness to very funny and shocking effect, poking holes in the logic behind the rules of the stories. Without spoiling anything, Achimi has his hands cut off as one of his punishments and later marries his uncle because that, of course, is the remedy for receiving another man’s sperm outside of wedlock. Modern religious practices need a lot of interpretation and mental gymnastics to re-contextualise morality “lessons” like this, and All His Beloved Children repurposes them more literally to show just how many exceptions we’re willing to make for our ancient rules.
The new Kings Cross Theatre on Broadway keeps the traverse stage arrangement it is known for: in which the audience sits on either side of a central rectangular expanse, something like a catwalk. This gives you the unusual pleasure of watching other audience members watch what you’re watching, and self-consciously gauging how your reactions compare. Adrienne Andrews’ set design is a long dining table set atop a mound of sand, with Achimi, Cain and Isis’ bed hanging on the wall at the end. The costume design by Monique Langford ties into the beiges and browns of the sand and dining table, giving a suitably biblical feel. This means the red blood of punishment, and the sticky white of pleasure, stand out in a viscerally disgusting way.
After the show, someone said to me: “I can’t wait to read your review to figure out what I think about this one”. Part of the joy of All His Beloved Children is that the act of figuring it out together is built into the experience. It resists a single interpretation by tying together disparate elements of didactic stories and showing you that things aren’t, and shouldn’t, be as black-and-white as we’d like them to be. Our search for an answer and for consistency has lead us here — but the specific here of an intellectual piece of theatre in Sydney, Australia is a very privileged (and white) one.
In our modern, minimalist and institutionalized world we describe the beauty of faith and religion through very narrow eyes. We love a bit of orientalism and exoticism when talking about religion, and sometimes forget that, despite the divine appearance of mosques, churches, temples and other religious artifacts, religious institutions are built by humans. Religion and creation stories become morals, which become laws, which become unquestionable facts. This doesn’t make religion and religious institutions inherently bad, it just means that they need to be rigorously held to account in the same way that our other cultural practices are.
All His Beloved Children makes a bold claim in arguing that: “your book is my book: we are all the same”. It succeeds in pointing out parallels and absurdities of some of the world’s religions, but conveniently ignores more philosophical approaches such as those found in Confucianism, Islam and even Agnosticism. Also lurking in the background of every conversation of religion are the continuing acts of violence perpetrated in the name of faith right this minute, often with the aim of achieving sameness.
Making stories and myths is impossible without someone to make them for. The great thing about experiencing them at the theatre (or in other kinds of congregations, like churches or mosques) is that you’re forced to sit down and watch something at the same time as a bunch of other people, and then talk to them about it at the end. I won’t pretend I know all the answers, I’m just happy to try and put them into coherent sentences for the benefit of people who care enough to read them. All His Beloved Children does a similar thing, and draws together myths to poke holes in them, find their similarities and differences, and hopefully show us that the most important part of telling stories is doing it together – with all of the differences, and possible answers, we might have.
All His Beloved Children plays at KXT on Broadway until 20 May 2023. Find tickets and information here.
Images by Phil Erbacher
Charlotte is the editor of Kaleidoscope Arts Journal, a little enby and a big mess. Their friends regularly worry that they might overdose on theatre.
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