Weary: The Story of Edward Dunlop
David Bridie's score for Alan Hopgood's stage adaptation of Weary Dunlop's war diaries, with spoken word from the original cast.
Sir Edward "Weary" Dunlop was a surgeon who spent the war years as a prisoner of the Japanese, first in Java and then on the Burma–Thailand Railway, operating in appalling conditions and standing between his men and their captors. He kept diaries throughout, at considerable risk. Alan Hopgood's stage adaptation brought that account to Australian audiences. This is its soundtrack.
The score is by David Bridie, the ARIA Award-winning composer behind Not Drowning, Waving and My Friend the Chocolate Cake, whose work has long sat somewhere between the atmospheric and the plainly Australian. Here it gives the production a spine without ever crowding the material.
The release is not only music. Bridie's compositions are interwoven with spoken-word excerpts voiced by the original stage cast, which makes this a record of the production itself as much as a listening experience — a permanent archive of a landmark piece of Australian theatre, and of one of the more extraordinary accounts to come out of the war.
Product details
Format: Audio CD
Music by: David Bridie
Features: Original cast dialogue excerpts
Condition: New