Cover Image: (Left to right) Tadhg Lawrence, Myles Pollard and Taran Knight in Catalpa: Flight to Freedom, presented by Theatre 180 at the Western Australian Maritime Museum. Photo: Stefano Kerby.

Catalpa: Flight to Freedom
Western Australian Maritime Museum 
Theatre 180
Directed by Stuart Halusz 

Filmmakers for as long as I can remember have been desperate to tell the story of the Western Australian colonial-era prison break which has come to be known by the name of the American sailing ship that picked up the six runaways Fenians, The Catalpa.

It’s not hard to understand why the Catalpa story has loomed so large in the imagination of movie-makers. Apart from our embrace of the Irish resistance to British colonialism — who doesn’t love a rebel with poetry in their soul? — the daring and the logistics of co-ordinating the breakout with a ship that has sailed half way round the world is the stuff of rip-roaring high-seas adventure. 

We are yet to get Catalpa on the big or small screen (apart from an ABC documentary in 2007), but Theatre 180’s breakneck stage version gives us a glimpse of what such an epic might be even though there are just three actors on stage.

Using their signature cine-theatre style, in which they open out theatrical versions of great WA stories (A Fortunate Life, Sydney II: Lost and Found, Taking Liberty), the trio somehow manage to embody the many people involved in the Catalpa breakout and rescue and to encapsulate in an average-length play a story crying out for a widescreen epic or a television series.

They do it with a mixture of imagination, artistry and speed, distilling a narrative that stretched over many months, from planning to execution, into an edge-of-the seat thriller that intercuts between action taking place across the globe and climaxing with a chase scene off the Western Australian coast.

Catalpa: Flight to Freedom opens in Fremantle Prison in the 1870s where a group of Fenians are rotting in what James Wilson describes in a letter smuggled out to the New York journalist and fellow republican John Devoy as “a living tomb”.

Wilson’s letter triggers a plot to rescue the Fenians by buying a former whaling ship and reverting it to its former use as a means of disguise and hiring a skilled sailor named George Anthony (Myles Pollard) to lead the rescue.

Though Anthony is a Quaker and had no stake in the Irish battle to throw off the English yolk he emerges as the hero of the story, breaking a promise to his wife not to back onto the water and risking prosecution because “it was simply the right thing to do.”

Thus begins the race to get the six Fenians out of Fremantle Prison and Western Australia, with Anthony keeping his crew in the dark as to their true mission and two Fenian agents dispatched to the colony’s port to lay the groundwork for the escape.

The writing-directing team of Stuart Halulsz and Pollard jump between New York and Fremantle, between land and sea at such a rapid-fire pace we could be watching a Hollywood action movie, with the speed picking up in the cracking last 20 minutes or so.

They’re able to do this because Pollard and his two co-stars, British-born Taran Knight and Irishman Tadhg Lawrence, so effectively switch between characters, picking up and dropping accents without skipping a beat and at all times keeping the story lucid. It’s a complex story but we never lose track.

Indeed, part of the fun of Catalpa: Flight to Freedom is the idea of three actors telling the kind of story that a Ridley Scott or a Steven Spielberg would tell with a large cast, huge sets, replicas of ships, computer animation and a symphony orchestra for the soundtrack. This is like one of those mile-a-minute cutdown Shakespeare productions, with the storytelling audacity part of the fun.

They even manage to strike a balance between amusement at the modest means used to evoke an epic and the keeping the audience who had packed Fremantle Maritime Museum for the world premiere Catalpa: Flight to Freedom on the edge of their seats during the recreation of a raging storm. 

Indeed, the production, even with the addition of film, feels a bit like the kind of theatrical spectacle that might have been put on during the time the Fenians were broken out of Fremantle Prison — a rip-roaring yarn for the pre-cinematic crowd.

While the pace had me leaning forward in my seat I wished Halusz and Pollard had slowed things down a few times and shifted from epic storytelling to traditional drama and reflection so we could peer into the souls of the men wallowing in prison and those risking their lives to get them out.

I especially wanted a moment in which Anthony’s reasons beyond “it’s the right thing to do” for going on such an unimaginable life-and-death adventure when he had no dog in the fight and was a man of peace. I wanted to see him challenged and even worry about what he was doing when, as he says himself in the climax, it risked triggering war between the United States and Great Britain.

But the opening night audience didn’t seem to share my desire for quieter, more dramatic moments and seemed to relish in Theatre 180’s skill in mixing media and wrangling a sprawling story into a gripping evening’s entertainment set in a space not far from where events took place. 

It is also a reminder of the power of the theatre to use the most modest of means to tell the grandest of tales.

Catalpa: Flight to Freedom is on at the Western Australian Maritime Museum until November 9. Unfortunately, the season is booked out.

There are seasons at the Fremantle Prison (March 19-22) Ace Cinemas, Rockingham (April 29-30) and the Como Theatre (May 14-17).

Bookings through Humantix.