Robina Beard has been working all her life in television, dance, drama, comedy, children’s theatre, and theatre restaurants, both as a performer and director. Her most ‘famous’ persona was that of Madge the Palmolive Dishwashing Lady. In 2011, she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for Services to the Theatre.
In TALES OF KABBARLI she plays the legendary figure of Daisy Bates, a journalist and anthropologist who lived with indigenous tribes for over 30 years, at Ooldea, on the Nullabor, South Australia. Robina has been playing the role for many years, in Adelaide, Melbourne and Riverside Parramatta.
Apart from a presentation to the National Aboriginal and Islander Dance Academy, this is the show’s first full production in central Sydney. Robina has been closely associated with aboriginal communities, especially in theatre and dance, for decades. She was associate producer of the first aboriginal theatre group to tour Europe, and has been a leading teacher at NAISDA. The show is also a timely contribution in the year of the Voice referendum.
Robina says the show is a unique venture in dramatic acting in her busy career of dance, music theatre and comedy. She is pleased at the positive feedback the show has received from reviewers. “One knows they are in the presence of a consummate actor.” (Adelaide Theatre Guide) The Sydney Morning Herald said ““Beard’s performance as Bates in Geoffrey Sykes’ one-woman play is so featherlight she barely seems to be acting. She creates a character as soft as early morning light and just as luminous. The music of her lilting Irish accent effortlessly entwines with the poeticism of Sykes’s script.’
Bates was Irish and had a love for aboriginal legends and the natural beauty of the outback. “Her writing, stories and vision are fascinating and it’s difficult not be to be spellbound as Beard, in a soft Irish brogue, delivers a master class in descriptive narrative acting.” (InDaily Adelaide) Her Irishness also explains her sense of injustice at the loss of the ancient corroboree site at Oldea.
Bates witnessed the intrusion of the Trans Australian railway, and competing demands for water between white and black cultures. She witnessed a huge event in the history of first peoples in this country. “One woman’s lament for the vanishing tribes” and of the “tight lipped ghost speaking of the destruction of the tribes of her region.” (Melbourne Times)
The play is written by Geoffrey Sykes, who has had a long involvement in theatre and media. “ Dialogue is beautifully lyrical and flows as freely as the mighty river on which his story is set.” (Adelaide Theatre Guide). “Writer/director Geoffrey Sykes collects the opal-gems of Bates’s activist/anthropological writings, as well as the ochre-grit of her lyric prose, in a rich tapestry that is the playscript he and Beard have refined.” (Sydney Arts Guide)
In a year that focuses on The Voice referendum, TALES OF KABBARLI tells of major transformative events through the eyes of the only person able to record. Bates saw herself as a protector, and long before first peoples had a voice of their own she sought to give them one.
Geoffrey Sykes’ play TALES OF KABBARLI with Robina Beard playing Daisy Bates will play the Actors Pulse Theatre, 103 Regent Street, Redfern between the 20th and 29th April 2023.
Bookings via http://www.playscript.net.au/
Or https://www.trybooking.com/CGFHV
Sydney Arts Guide has two double passes to give away to the performances on Thursday 20th April and the performance on Saturday 22nd April 2023.