How to Vote! or, the repercussions of political ambition and personal rivaries within student leadership and media organisations in the context of the Post-Covid-19 Liberal University Institution, Canberra Youth Theatre, Playhouse, Canberra Theatre, Sept 7-10

 

For Canberra Youth Theatre's older student piece, this year they've picked an epic, in staging and cast size, featuring 26 cast members taking the Playhouse stage for a two-hours-fourty-five minute comedy about student politics (featuring sidelines taking in student journalism and student theatre). As part of their 50th anniversary celebrations, it's a little indulgent, a little rambling but very funny and reasonably insightful in showing how the demographics of a simple student election may play out.

We see the election from various angles -the ex-president who is clearly playing some kind of angle but keeps her cards close to her chest, the journalists chasing a scoop and the potential for a career afterward, the exhausted vice-chancellor, and the three candidates and their teams and friends. There's a lot to cover (maybe a little too much, leading to that two hour forty-five minute running time) and Luke Roger's production does it with reasonable speed, playing with the resources of the playhouse including video elements, parallel scenes, interactive elements and a couple of jokes about certain popular European directors.

I will say that the sprawling nature of the narrative does mean that it inevitably gets a little shallow - none of the characters really goes particularly beyond two dimensions for very long, and the plot does tend to rely a little too much on people being led or bullied into choices that they wouldn't naturally have made, and by setting up an obvious manipulator figure then having her disappear for about an hour of stage time only to come back at the end doesn't make the fact she's been manipulating all that we've seen in the missing bunch of time particularly more surprising - Joanna Richards is great in the role but I feel like it'd be more surprising if the show had more confidence in keeping her offstage for as long as possible so we get surprised by how much she's gotten done, rather than "oh, she just did a little bit more than you were told" at the end. It does get a little bit fond of its montages which don't always have a short sharp gag delivery system to justify their length - there's a certain fondness for generalised cast movements around the stage that don't hit as precisely as they should. 

Still, this is a great chunk of raw material that is relevant, funny, cynical, and fairly strongly performed