Review: Dixon and Daughters a the Old Fitz
Review by Carly Fisher
Family secrets have a nasty habit of surviving the people who created them. In Deborah Bruce’s Dixon & Daughters, three generations of women are forced to confront the damage that silence, complicity and unresolved trauma can inflict when they are allowed to travel unchecked from one generation to the next.
Presented by Tiny Dog Productions at Sydney’s Old Fitz Theatre, this Australian premiere is a polished and accomplished production with a terrific ensemble at its centre. That said, the script left me hoping for more than I got and for such a bold topic, overall felt a little lacking in punch.
The performances are undoubtedly the production’s greatest strength. Vanessa Downing brings considerable weight to Mary, while Linda Nicholls-Gidley gives Bernie a beautifully controlled complexity. Romney Hamilton is compelling as Julie, with Sarah Jane Starr bringing plenty of energy to Briana. Danette Potgieter brings a welcomed sense of calm to the ensemble. Rounding out the cast, Rylea Eilis offers comedic relief with assurance, despite the heavy emotional backstory of the character.
Kim Harwick’s direction has led the production to feel appropriately lived in. There is great chemistry between the troubled characters; they feel like people with years of shared history, grievances and habits sitting just beneath the surface. The tension between them is ripe and well executed by the fantastic cast.
The Yorkshire dialect work is exceptional — genuinely some of the best I have heard on a Sydney stage this year. It is detailed without becoming distracting and, most importantly, remains remarkably consistent across the cast. Credit is due to the performers, but also to Linda Nicholls-Gidley in her role as dialect coach. It is the kind of work that can easily go unnoticed when done well, but here it deserves particular recognition.
Mia MacCormick’s set initially didn't particularly appeal to me. As the production unfolded, however, its value became increasingly apparent. It is highly functional and makes clever use of the Fitz’s intimacy, giving the actors a physical world that can accommodate the shifting dynamics of the story and offering space for each plot to naturally develop. The more the show went on, the more impressed I became by its design. Its success lies in the fact that, again, it feels lived in. It becomes a fitting physical counterpart to a play about the things families accumulate and struggle to escape.
The production itself is mature in its handling of difficult material. Dixon & Daughters is ultimately interested in the consequences of silence: what happens when people know something is wrong but choose not to act, when speaking up comes with consequences, and when doing nothing can become its own form of complicity. It is timely and yet transcends any particular period simultaneously.
The script takes its time revealing what sits beneath these relationships, and there is a recurring sense that the characters know something the audience doesn't and that we are expected to gradually catch up. Mystery and withheld information can be enormously effective theatrical tools, but here I found that I was more conscious of the construction of the device rather than caught up in the mystery itself.
The pacing suffers as a result. At 90 minutes, Dixon & Daughters is hardly an epic, yet I found myself aware of the running time — particularly in the middle sections where the story seemed to be circling material rather than driving decisively towards it.
There are also several attempts at comic relief that didn't quite land for me. Humour has every right to sit alongside difficult subject matter, and in some productions it can make the darker moments more powerful. Here, though, a few of the comedic beats felt slightly misplaced, made all the more apparent by the quiet that followed them in the audience. To me, these seemed to be flaws of the script, more than the production.
Dixon & Daughters has all the ingredients of something that could be genuinely explosive: a strong ensemble, a compelling premise, the enticing intimacy of the venue and subject matter that asks uncomfortable questions about what we owe one another. Instead, the writing sometimes feels as though it is carefully leading us towards conclusions that the audience might have been trusted to discover for themselves.
This feels particularly noticeable within the context of the increasing number of female-led works being staged in Sydney that have something important to say but seem to stop just short of saying it with their full force. There is an appetite for theatre that doesn't simply identify difficult subjects, but gets its hands dirty with them. Theatre that trusts its audience enough to sit in the discomfort. I personally would love to see more of it on our Sydney stages.
Dixon & Daughters is a polished reminder that trauma rarely ends with the person who experiences it. It gets passed down through families, through silence, through avoidance and through the things we choose not to say. It challenges the idea of innocence for a bystander cleverly and drives home the point that saying nothing says a lot.
