Highway of Lost Hearts
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A surreal road trip through 4,500km of country. A vaguely magical dog, a vaguely racist countryside, and a quest to find something as abstract as a ‘heart’. The Highway of Lost Hearts is matched in its strangeness only by its charm; its sad, engrossing story about a woman named Mot travelling far and wide to try and find her heart.
This is essentially a one woman show, though with the incredible voices of Australian country duo Smith & Jones acting like the fates, singing and reiterating the events of the story as they unfold, passing them down into outback myth.
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Photos © Hannah Groggan
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I love stories that find some tide of magical realism to cast over Australian culture. Psychedelic anomalies rub shoulders with uncertain strangers and roadkill in this incredible piece of creative storytelling. Mot, played by the fantastic Kate Smith, doesn’t just account for her own voice in the story, but the voice of every character, every diegetic sound, and of course the strange musings of her highly empathetic dog (though, I guess most dogs are empathetic?).
I don’t want to make any comparisons to D&D here and out myself as a colossal nerd, but Kate seriously is acting like an incredible DM. She doesn’t just guide the story, but she breathes life into it, the amazing set and soundwork behind the stage augment the fact that she is the show. The racist petrol station clerk, the shrill cashier named “Sherl”, the trucker with kind eyes and the sad drunk at a lonely pub - they’re all her, cast in her voice, her unique mannerisms for each character.
And because this is a road trip, a road trip that ends at Sydney’s coast but starts in Alice Springs, the glimpses we catch of all these other characters are fleeting at most. So we’re just given these little vignettes of these strange, hurt people, all of whom in some way are searching for the same thing our Mot is.
Smith & Jones are like the layer of rich icing between two slabs of cake. One slab can be Mot and the other can be… I don’t know. The dude who ate popcorn throughout the entire show. Metaphors are hard. While not actively “in” the story, but very frequently on the stage and occupying a space in Mot’s journey, they are an essential component to the show’s fabric. I did feel that sometimes their musical accompaniments between each scene were more stifling than augmenting. These musical departures worked at their best when they played up to the dream like nature of the show, reciting songs that have something more poignant and insightful to say about the scene, while the less effective transitions were ones that essentially just retold whatever the last scene was, in a musical way. Regardless of to what effect each song segment was used for, the voices of these performers, alongside the guitars and pianos they employed alongside them, never ceased to drop my jaw, no matter how often I heard them.
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Photos © Hannah Groggan
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Highway of Lost Hearts is one of those rare, intimate shows that will always occupy a space in my mind more as a feeling than a specific memory of the show. Its a play that acts like a dream, taking you through this sad, sometimes terrifying ride of things that don’t always click, but in the moment of them, you’re lost in the dream’s logic. It has a lot to say about the way Australia is today, and it wears these sentiments on its sleeve. Mary Anne Butler, the playwright and original author of the book this show was based on, has ensured the craft and care of her original novel has translated perfectly onto the stage.
Australian road trips are ripe for commentary and abstract storytelling, and Highway of Lost Hearts canonises itself among the many stories that have sought to show something of merit, something important that we need to see, hiding in the Outback.
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