Happy Birthday Wanda June, Canberra Rep, Theatre 3

Kurt Vonnegut isn't really known as a playwright - his one play, "Happy Birthday Wanda June" had a short run off-broadway in 1970-71 (and a 6 week revival this year, again off-broadway), was turned into a barely remembered film and then disappeared into the collection of "also wrote a play" alongside those by authors like David Malouf, Thomas Keneally, Henry James and Doris Lessing - a literary curio rather than a perennial. Still, someone's decided to put this on stage anyway so here it is.

It's a very 70's mix of broad comedy and drama, dealing with what nowdays we call "toxic masculinity", as the missing-presumed-dead Great White Hunter Harold Ryan returns home to his wife only to discover she has got educated and has acquired two new suitors - a peace-loving doctor and a somewhat more brutish vacuum salesman. While his son celebrates his return, his wife feels inclined to do so, and it quickly becomes clear Harold may have been better left for dead...

This is a bit of a mess - Vonnegut's dialogue doesn't always sit comfortably with actors, and the play is far more interested in bringing up a bunch of interesting themes than in consistently addressing and resolving them in any conventional dramatic way. Still, it comes alive in moments, whether it be letting Ryan off the cuff to be fully monstrous, or in the portrayals of a distinctly amoral afterlife.

Michael Sparks as Ryan hasn't let the fact he's in a less-than-great play stop him from giving a great performance anyway - his satanically bearded Ryan is a bombastic, destructive creature but damn if he's not interesting to watch. Part of the problem with the play, in fact, is that nobody really gets to solidly stand toe-to-toe with Ryan until near the end, and even there, it's the wrong goddamn character doing the toe-to-toe-ness (Penelope, who does the opening narration, clearly should be the one to fully combat him, but after some great set-up, she never really gets a moment to cut loose). The three afterlife characters are also presented with a lot of strength (although frustratingly they never quite connect with the main plot of the play - they seem more like interesting diversions than actual plot development) - Jemima Phillips' polyanna-ish Wanda June, Iain Murray's offhandedly sardonic Major Sigfried von Knoisburg and Antoina Kitzl's drunkenly unimpressed Mildred liven up the action considerably. There's also quite a solid performance from young Nick Dyball as Ryan's son, a realistically moody kid who sustains our interest (and who would also have been an interesting choice to deal his father the final blow - can you tell I really found the ending flat?). Jess Waterhouse is most interesting when the script is giving her things to do in the first third-or-so of the play - once Harold arrives the script leaves this charming clever sophisticate and gives her very little to do except hide from her husband. David Bennett as Ryan's fellow-returnee-from-the-jungle lends a bit of entertaining side-play but, yet again, what he has doesn't quite add up to enough to justify the time spent.

Cate Clelland's production gives this as much pace and cartoonish joy as it possibly can take, including some great retro-design both in set (Clelland) and costumes (Helen Wotjas). I just wish that all this skill was dedicated to a better play.

Switzerland, Pidgeonhole Theatre, Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre

It's a rarer thing than it probably should be for local theatre companies to take part in the Canberra Theatre's subscription season - the last time we saw one was about five years ago with Everyman's "Home at the End". But hopefully with this being a rocking great sell-out hit, the gap may be reduced a little, and maybe, just maybe, the biggest professional venue in town may be persuaded to invest a little more in our own local product.

Anyway, apart from that, how is the show? It's a tight two hander, an Australian-written, European-set, American-characters-led thriller about Patricia Highsmith, best-selling thriller writer best known for "Strangers on a Train" and the Ripley series of books - confronted by a representative of her publishers requesting one more book from her, a young-but-enthusiastic man called Edward Ridgeway. Highsmith's bitterness, rage and defensiveness is high, but the temptation to prove herself one more time proves stronger than she's expecting, and the cat-and-mouse game proves that Ridgeway may not be quite as mousy as he seems...

Joanna Murray-Smith's script is one of her best (for me, she does better when tempted into the more heavily plotted genres of thriller (this) and farce (Female of the Species), rather than the looser moral-conundrum plays like "Honour", "Fury" and "The Gift" she's made her name with). Yep, there are a couple of speeches that wander closer to the-author's-essay-pieces rather than functional character dialogue, but it's a tight evening that succeeds in unpeeling two characters in ways that are constantly thrilling. Jordan Best's production seduces us in - Karen Vickery's venomous Highsmith is an unholy terror who we're glad is firmly on the other side of the footlights to us, and Lachlan Ruffy's Ridgeway proves a worthy adversary - Ruffy still looks ridiculously boyish, damn his hide (I'm sure there's a portrait in his cupboard somewhere), but shows that the long gap we've had between seeing him on Canberra stages hasn't been wasted. Vickery too shows her skill in making Highsmith just the right mix of brutal and engaging - she's a fascinating monster to watch. Michael Sparks' visually dense set contains all the right nooks, crannies and lethal instruments, and Cynthia Jolley Rogers lighting brings the right amount of mood and focus to the shifting onstage power-struggle.

I'd usually say "rush out and buy a ticket" but you can't. Rush out and buy tickets to anything these people are involved in next time, get in early. It's rare that work this good has sold this well (damn you Canberra audiences) but I'm glad that this time, quality has been rewarded and can't wait to see what comes next for everyone involved.

John Cameron Mitchell: The Origin of Love, Playhouse, Canberra Theatre

This is more a concert/cabaret than theatre, but I'm including it anyway because it was awesome. Singing a range of songs from his musical "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" (eight, skipping "Angry Inch", "Hedwig's Lament", "Exquisite Corpse" and the "Wicked Little Town" reprise), plus a cut song and a few other related extras, with a full backing rock band and backing singer (Amber Martin, who performs a few solos), Mitchell surrounds this with stories of how the show got created and some of the after-effects of the show. If Mitchell is now over 50 (compared to the 30 something who first performed Hedwig) his energy has barely dipped - the harder-rocking songs get full-pitch performances while the ballads still cut just as deep into the heart. And while inevitably there's some blurring of the lines between Hedwig and John CAmeron Mitchell, we get a chance to see a stunning performer giving his all in a culturally iconic show. If this is how Mitchell chooses to perform the songs from now on, I can't say I'd complain very much.