Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Canberra Rep, Theatre 3

 I'll be honest upfront, this is not my favourite Tennessee Williams play. In the context of his works it lands around the point where his plays start to become semi-self-parodies, a mixture of southern sterotypes yelling around a grand mansion in a "who's going to inherit the estate" story that plays like a thinner version of Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes", also slightly distorted by Williams deciding that the first two acts should largely take the form of two of the most dynamic characters, Maggie and Big Daddy, having a conversation with the sullen, moody, undemonstrative Brick, with the third act carrying the weight of the actual plotting (and being the part of the play most likely to get rewritten, with about four different versions of Act 3 in circulation). 

Rep's production does reasonably solidly by the material, due to some strong casting decisions and a gorgeous Cate Clelland set design. Victoria Tyrell Dixon's Maggie is compelling, mercurial, rageful and able to handle the vast amounts of material Act one gives her, consistently fascinating and attention-drawing. Michael Sparks carries most of Act two on his back as the irritable patriarch, only slightly aware how little he's really connecting to his son as he continues to impart his opinions. Teig Saldana plays Brick as he is written, irate and compelled more by the desire for alcohol and his lost memories of greatness than anything he's actually in the room with, but he manages to handle the shifts in act three better than most versions I've seen, and keeps a character who I've found irritating in the past from completely losing me. Lanie Hart's Mae has a wig that does a lot of the performing for her, a contained, conniving bob that shows her small-town avaricious self, in a pristine white dress with a maternity bump, constantly assured she's the one who knows best. Ryan Erlandsen as her husband-and-partner-in-crime, the odious Gooper, has all the self-important pride the character needs. Liz St Clair Long as the hyper-emotional Big Mama rolls with every insult that Sparks throws her way, convinced her smothering-kind-of-love is secretly welcomed by everybody.

It's inherent in the writing here, but it never quite feels sensible that all these people would be rushing into the bedroom of Brick and Maggie to lay out cunning plots and schemes, but there's a strong blocking sense around the space giving characters space to do their manouvres without losing the connections between them. Cate Clelland's set gives us a gorgeous mansion bedroom, dominated at centre by the liquor cabinet where Brick is constantly drawn to just one more drink. 

In short, while this isn't a play I love, it's quite a solid production of it, showing it off to good advantage with a solid cast.

Wolf Lullaby, Echo Theatre, The Q

 Hilary Bell's 1996 play is probably still her masterpiece, a provocative confrontation about a 9 year old girl in a small town in Tasmania who's implicated in a murder investigation, and the effects this has on her parents and the cop investigating. Trapping the audience in with the cast of 4, we're forced to confront the disturbing nature of childhood games, the fears of parenting and the implications of justice, over a tight 90 minutes. 

Jordan Best last directed this play back in 2006 in a tightly controlled Street 2 production, and returns to the play with enthusiasm, letting her new cast find their own moments and emphases as the four find themselves sinking further and further into the darkness - the investigating cop whose professional manner starts to fall apart as he realises the implications of what he's finding, the mother who just wants to do the right thing, despite not quite knowing what that thing might be, the distant father who decides to double down on his distance, and the little girl whose night terrors may give indications of something else entirely None seek to play for sympathy - Rachel Pengilly's transformation into a 9 year old is astonishingly real as Lizzie is by turns inquisitive, playful, terrified and devious. Natasha Vickery's Angela takes over the weight of the second half of the play with strength as it becomes harder for her to balance her roles as a responsible person and a mother. Craig Alexander gives his cop an anchor of inherited authority only to lay out the cruellest moment in the last minutes of the play as he pushes Angela's buttons hard. Joel Harwood never plays for sympathy as the father whose disengagement becomes only more obvious as the story plays out, desperate to ignore what is in front of him. 

The other production elements - Chris Zuber's simple junkyard set, Jacob Aquilina's stark lighting, and Matthew Webster's chilling design - all add to the tension and draw us in further. 

A great provocative chiller on a February night, this is theatre that should not be missed - something to disturb the mind and the heart.

Beautiful Thing, New Theatre

 Johnathan Harvey's 1993 comedy does feel like it's every gay directors first play - or at least it's shown up on a lot of gay directors resumes since then. It's a gentle love story between two 15 year old boys on a South London housing estate, and given the gentle sense of humour and the working class background it plays slightly as a queer Willy Russell play. At the time it premiered it was already one of the gentler queer plays around - Angels in America was being put together in the same period, and Mark Ravenhill's far more confrontational "Shopping and F**king" was two years away, and at the time I admit I was looking for more of the raw rough-edged stuff rather than something this gentle.

But nearly 30 years on, it's time for me to catch up with a play I've missed from my canon. It's funny and sweet, a little messy here and there (it almost feels like Harvey isn't quite sure what to do with two of the straight characters, as he sends one off on a drug-fuelled trip and exiles another offstage), and it's clearly pushing the rougher edges of the love story offstage (the homophobic dad of Ste is only ever a voice offstage), but where it counts - the gentle arrival of a romance into the lives of two boys who weren't expecting it, and the impact on the people around them - it plays true and honest. 

In this production it gets a solid presentation - Will Manton as non-sporty Jamie and Bayley Prendergast as the more rough-and-tumble Ste have a natural chemistry and it's a delight to see them edging their way together in act one and working out what their relationship means in act two. Julia Kennedy Scott as Jamie's mum is a rough-edged delight, blunt and direct but with the heart in the right place. Hannah Zaslawski suffers a bit from the script's lack of clarity on why Leah's in the story - her function appears to be so that Jamie has someone to talk to before Ste comes along, but her goofy climactic appearance doesn't really work and feels more like a lot of dramatic noise covering up a lack of character development rather than a set of personality quirks. Caspar Hardaker has a character where the script isn't sure whether he should be mocked or taken seriously, and his performance falls on the side of mocking in ways that feel weird and make him a bit more superfluous than he should be. 

Some clever design decisions in David Marshall-Martin's set mean that scenes flow easily into one another, and the and the production feels coherent and sweet all round.

In short this is a reasonable production of a nice but not-entirely-essential play. 

My Brilliant Career, Belvoir

 Yes, we're back for another year (though given the number of things that have been rescheduled from last year, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is 2020 done properly this time). It's nice to be back in the theatre with a big scale classic Australian Novel adaptation by a major new Australian playwright, in a beautiful and strong production - this one was originally going to tour Canberra as well but the tour got cancelled so this is my chance to catch the highly anticipated premiere.

This is my first encounter with any version of "My Brilliant Career", though it turns out this has a somewhat familiar narrative as a girl in a large rural family seeks to find herself in pre-federation country NSW, between growing up roughly in an oversized impoverished family, finding some comfort with wealthier relatives and their set before being thrown back into circumstances worse than before as she becomes governess to the children of one of her father's creditors. There's wooing, there's triumph over the odds, there's a lot of direct-address to the Audience as Sybylla attempts to justify her decisions. It's the kind of tale that could be described as rollicking - if you can spot similarities with a couple of other works (there does seem a slight element of bushbound Jane Austen in the wealth relatives sections, and the governess section weirdly feels a bit like "Sound Of Music" with the children attempting to torture the new arrival, despite the novel pre-dating "Sound of Music" by about 60 years), it never the less plays the variations on familiar themes with verve, wit and energy. 

Played on a fairly basic set (seven chairs, one piano, one set of boards centre stage and a curtain), the costumes do most of the work in setting period and character, with Nikki Shiels as our heroine centre stage for nearly all of the runtime, capturing all the mercurial characteristics of the lead, professedly anti-romantic and rough but with higher aspirations and desires that seem forever beyond her grasp, she's a fascinating figure to spend time with. The other six members of the cast move in and out of various roles - Blazey Best largely as mothers and aunts, variously frustrated, indulgent and rough-as-guts, Guy Simon largely as the potential romantic lead Harry Beechum, Jason Chong as dads and uncles, Tracey Mann largely as Sybylla's formidible Grandmother and Harry's equally formidable mother (but also scoring as a particularly grotty McSwat child), Tom Conroy landing both as sympathetic brothers and a snotty potential suitor, and Emma Harvie as sisters, a maid and a romantic rival - all give their various personas distinction while serving the greater purpose of Sybylla's story 

Kate Champion's direction together with strong lighting byAmeila Lever-Davidson and strong sound design from Steve Francis keep the show moving through the various twists and turns of narrative, coming up with effective solutions for potentially-difficult-to-stage moments like Harry and Sybylla's falling out of a boat and moving from grotty to high-culture, active big outdoors action to intimate reflective scenes with aplomb. It's a beautiful production that deserves to get wider exposure whenever possible.  

The "Well, I liked it" awards, 2020

 2020 was a real 2020 of a year, not least in local theatre. With so many shows cancelled or deferred til 2021, it's important to look at the shows we did get a chance to see, and to praise what was great about them.

First of all, there's my favourie musical of the year - never mind that I only got to see two musical productions this year, "HMS Pinafore" is still my favourite production of a musical all year. Kate Gaul's production gave a free-wheeling, funny, delightful gloss to the Gilbert and Sullivan perennial, finding the right moments to play serious and giving us performers performing in a gorgeously gift-wrapped show that maintained all its energy in the Q in a little toybox stage-within-a-stage. It's playing Sydney again in Paramatta as part of the Sydney festival and will hopefully continue to delight audiences as much as it possibly can.

In local plays, my favourite is one I wouldn't have expected - Liz Bradley's production of "What the Butler Saw" - I'd always found Orton's play a bit of a cold fish on the page, with its brutal take on farce feeling more cruel than the genre's usual take. Bradley's production leaned into this by empasising the painful reality of the events, the blithe indifference towards justice and the wild improbability of the deus ex-machina in a farce that was twice as funny for being twice as honest about the pain. 

In performers I need to give special mention to Amy Dunham, who scored twice in two very different roles - as the petulant Rose-of-Sharon in "The Grapes of Wrath", singing a gorgeous "Down to the River" and drawing us into the emotional final moments of the play, and as the cleaning-obsessed Jane Hopcroft in "Absurd Person Singular", causing constant delight with her nervously demented energy. Gutsy performances that went all-in, truly WILI worthy.

Goodbye 2020, you had moments of glory but will not be missed. Onwards towards a renaissance of a 2021. 

Absurd Person Singular, Canberra Rep

 Ayckbourn feels like one of those British writers that has perpetually been on local stages, but it’s actually been about 7 years since Canberra last saw one of his plays (with “Improbable Fiction”) – his incisive, cleverly structured plays about middle-class foibles and follies hold up reasonably strongly, even (as in this case) almost 50 years after they were originally written – yes, this is clearly a product of a more distant time (I don’t think a contemporary play would have all three wives apparently not having an out-of-the-house job without that being a significant plot point, for example), but such things as the blatant sexism of the men when left alone, the social panic as people try to put on their best face to one another, and the way people inevitably bend to those with greater professional power are, alas, fairly eternal. It also, to a certain sense, takes the form of a backstage comedy, as three pairs of party-givers peddle madly to keep a convivial face as disasters big and small threaten to swamp their festive gatherings.

We begin with the upwardly mobile Hopcrofts, both obsessed with appearances and making inroads with their party guests to the point of active cruelty towards the cleaning-obsessed Jane (and it’s  a massive pleasure to get a classic Amy Dunham nutbag performance paired with a tightly-wound Arran McKenna performance) – and get introduced to two couples, the Brewster-Wrights (mildly oblivious banker and his tipsy wife), and the Jacksons (lothario architect and his depressed pill-popping wife), with another couple, the boisterous Potters left offstage to threaten everyone into retreat with their boorish behaviour.

Act two moves on to the apartment occupied by the Jacksons (and their hound-of-the-Baskervilles-like dog, another engrossing not-actually-on-stage character who’s brought to life through Neville Pye’s sound effects and some persistent door wiggling by the crew and cast), as Eva (a heartbreaking Steph Roberts) prepares a suicide note while her husband prepares to fly the coop with his new love, first seeking out a doctor to take care of her – both not realising they have invited the other couples over for pre-Christmas drinks. This act runs a tightrope – clearly there’s nothing humorous about attempted suicide, but there’s humour in the obliviousness of everyone around to her plight, assuming the various suicide attempts are home repairs projects and helping to carry those out (Dunham’s manic cleaning fetish of the first act gets a strong workout here), and this production manages to credit both the emotions and the absurdity of the moment.

Act three takes us to the posh Brewster-Wrights as the couple have retreated to their corners – Ronald reading in the kitchen, his wife in her bedroom cheerfully sodden. We get updates on what’s happened to the Jacksons, still together despite everything, and the intrusion of the Hopcrofts who have ridden the wave of success to the point where they have power over those they used to suck up to.

Jarrad West’s production is set very roughly a decade after the writing of the play, about the last time that the premise of three marriages where the husband is the sole breadwinner would hold true, in the mid 80s, late enough to feature Wham’s “Last Christmas” and a kitchen with a microwave – but it’s not fetishizing the period so much as choosing a time when the action fits. Costumes and set are nicely varied to delineate the three couples – from the chintzy practicality of the Hopcrofts to the squalor of the Jacksons to the grand-but-slightly-sterile look of the Brewster-Wrights.

This is a packed-plum-pudding of a Christmas play, full of laughs but also full of emotional truth, and a perfectly matched cast brings it across effectively with charm and insight.

Cursed!, Belvoir

 It's good to get back to Belvoir, my theatre home away from home. While this isn't the best show they've done in the last few years, it's at least a loud vulgar audience embracing comedy with a rich culturally diverse cast. 

The main weakness of the evening is Kodie Bedford's script, which feels more like a collection of scenes than a cohesive story - there's setups that don't pay off (including the title), there's a lead character who feels loosely defined except for her relationships to the rest of the cast, and there's a treatment of mental illness as "wacky people acting wacky" rather than anything deeper. But it's compensated for with a strong cast - in particular Sascha Horler, so frequently used as a supporting cast member, gets a big fat lead where she can run wild with the material and makes the most of it, in a series of incredibly tacky costumes Chenoa Deemal as the ostensible central character gets a bit sabotaged by a script that never really lets her have a cohesive interesting character beyond "vaguely capable of organising everybody else", but she gives it her best shot. Valerie Bader's two roles are a bit mixed - the Grandma who is the reason for everybody's gathering doesn't quite come across as strongly as the premise suggests she might, but her second act role as an awful aunt is a scene stealer consistently. Alex Stylianou and Shirong Wu both get better material as the brother and sister though neither really get a full arc so much as gestures towards one, and Bjorn Stewart gets some good laughs but, again, not really a complete character arc as the boyfriend. 

The usual Belvoir high standards of costume, set, lighting and sound are met pretty solidly, and it's an enjoyable afternoon (cause I was watching the matinee) in the theatre. But I wish that script development had pushed for something a little more cohesive.