No Sugar - Dramatic Performance

Dramatic Performance

NO SUGAR

Directors of stage performances usually use Dramatic performance to hold the viewers attention and also bring obvious ideas to the viewer’s attention. Jack Davis uses dramatic performance in his stage play ‘No Sugar’. To deliver this dramatic performance that regards Aboriginal values, Jack Davis uses a rage of techniques such as characterization and language. He does this in order to position the reader/viewer into completely agreeing with his views on racial discrimination, segregation and marginalization.

Jack Davis depicts Aboriginal living conditions to be very basic and poor. He provides a revised and extensive description throughout the stage play. With this being a stage play, the representation of the scenes may differ from play to play, but they still outline the main ideas that Jack Davis was trying to convey - poverty, inadequate housing and depressing life style. Jack Davis describes household items in depth and says they are all home made. This is shown in scene one “David and Cissie play cricket with a home made bat and ball”. By including the idea that most of these items are home made, Jack Davis reflects the real life fact that all Aboriginals had to build and create their own possessions as nothing was provided for them except bare essentials. Jack Davis conveys this idea thickly in scene one as the reader/viewer is told about them having a home made bat and ball, they are told that the Aboriginals need to kill a rabbit for dinner, they have to go to a waterhole to wash their clothes and the kids argue about money until they are given a small sum of three pence each, which pleases them.

Due to this story being set during the depression, people are always cutting corners in order to save money. In scene six it seems necessary to ask that a dead Aboriginal gets buried inside a coffin and not wrapped up in a rag “And don’t you go wrappin’ him up in the gubment blanket. You put him in a proper box”. Compared to the times now it is assumed that everyone gets buried inside a coffin when they die, it seems backward to wrap someone up in a blanket and bury them. Even when Mary is giving birth they use the bare minimum, instead of using baby powder they use ash from the fireplace “Now cover you in ashes. More better than Johnson’s baby powder eh?” This illustrates that the Aboriginals are trying to make the best of what they have and that they only posses the bare minimum.

Characterization is used throughout this stage play as a way of giving a dramatic performance to the audience/reader. Gran is the most characterized person in this stage play, she is the ‘Boss’ of the family and whatever she says goes, even when she is talking to white people. “You don’t want to shout like that, Chargeant. You’ll ‘ave a fit, just like a dingo when he gets bait”. Gran also knows many survival techniques that include making flour “Grind up Jam and wattle seeds”, or how to make soap out of a particular bush. Grans dramatic performance when dealing with matters underlines the main idea that Aboriginals deserve respect as they are very organized, and although undereducated in the white mans culture, they are smart in their own way. In addition, Grans actual name isn’t mentioned in the stage play, she is simply called ‘Gran’, this conveys the idea that this family has close bonds between each other and that everybody respects Gran enough to call her their grandma, even though this may not be true.

A.O Neville represents the most general view of Aboriginals; he constantly reveals his feelings toward black people and how highly he thinks of himself. He is regarded as being above everyone else, because of this he has a big ego and insists on using a big vocabulary, “Perhaps The West could run a contest for the most frugal civil servant”. Neville is also characterized as being oblivious