After 5 1/2 hours (three of them spent sitting on unyieldingly hard seats) a packed Dublin audience rose to provide a spontaneous, almost unanimous and well-deserved standing ovation for this Australian theatrical phenomenon presented by Company B Belvoir and Black Swan Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival on Friday night.
Adapted by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo from the Tim Winton novel, the piece breaks all or most of the standard rules of drama (its construction is more that of the TV soap opera than of most stage drama, packed with incident but devoid of a coherently dramatic frame) and defies categorisation as a piece of theatre. Its direction, by Neil Armfield, is deliberately old-fashioned - pale-brown drapes set around a bare sand-surrounded rectangle into and out of which big props and much furniture are hauled, mostly by the 14 actors, all but five of whom play multiple roles.
It makes no effort to recreate "realism", remaining overtly theatrical and using most of the oldest tricks in the business to create its effects. And the action is accompanied almost throughout by incidental music composed and played by Iain Grandage, seated downstage with keyboard and cello.
Despite some significant longueurs in both the first and second acts, its cumulative effect is to create theatrical magic. Despite frequent clumsiness in the director's grouping of characters on stage, some very patchy lighting by Mark Howett and far too many duologues in which the actors play without looking at each other, it maintains a sense of swirling humanity.
Centrally involved in the action are the members of the Pickles family and the Lamb family. Sam Pickles was left a house - No. 1 Cloud Street in Perth - in the will of his dead cousin. The Pickles family live in a kind of amoral haze and economic chaos and do not have the money to maintain the house, so they invite the Lambs, a provident and religious family, to share the premises with them. We watch the kids grow up and some of them marry and have children of their own.
There are arrivals and departures, disasters and tragedies, some joy and a lot of struggle and misery. And always there is the sound of water and the presence of the river, a particular obsession of young Fish Lamb, who was permanently brain-damaged by a fishing incident in which he nearly drowned. And there is the constant presence of the aboriginal black man, sometimes as everyone's nemesis and sometimes as a narrator. Happiness and sorrow are arbitrarily mixed, as in real life, not because there is dramatic purpose or need of them, but just because that's the way it is. Life rolls along, Perth develops, the families exist.
The acting is occasionally uneven, but always invested with energy and commitment and, if the rest of the company will forgive, the performance of Daniel Wyllie as Fish Lamb must be singled out as an act of high art, astonishing energy and sustained determination. But everyone contributed mightily to the creation of the theatrical magic.