“With love to lead the way, I’ve found more clouds of gray / Than any Russian play could guarantee”
So go the lyrics of the Gershwin classic But Not for Me.
You can only assume it’s a reference to Chekhov.
The Russian playwright’s meditation on melancholy – and whether love (or work) is its cause or its cure – is also a classic.
Can you really claim to be educated in modern theatre if you haven’t seen Chekhov’s big four: The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters?
This production by Last Waltz gives you the opportunity to fulfil part of the course requirements with only a three hour commitment (including interval.)
The translation by Laurence Senelick retains the original setting, and the design team under director Clara Voda effectively evoke the world of pre-Revolutionary Russia.
Chekhov is rightfully famed for the truthfulness of his work. And this production is true to that – in a rather provocative way. Vocal performances sometimes push to a realism that repudiates any assumption that art is a finely crafted thing: sometimes actors are too soft or too loud or too giggly. (Life, though, is all these things.) Occasionally, dialogue seems ad libbed, which may be indicative of a complete immersion in the reality of the characters, or it might just be ad libbing.
These bold choices encouraged me to consider the value of the original play. If we value Chekhov because he is truthful, it’s not because he presents an accurate representation of the human condition. It’s difficult to relate to these self-indulgent middle-class whingers. (Just go to Moscow, for God’s sake!) If we were ever meant to relate to their plight, then I suspect that time has passed (at least for me) and Chekhov can be safely dropped from the (fictitious & facetious) curriculum.
But I don’t think representing the human condition is what Chekhov really does. Instead, he gives us human behaviour, warts and all. And that’s the gift of this production.
Paul Gilchrist
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (based on a translation by Laurence Senelick)
This is a beautiful production of a truly beautiful play.
It’s set in Iran, in a classroom in which English is taught as a foreign language.
The script won Sanaz Toossi the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and by presenting it, and doing so brilliantly under the direction of Craig Baldwin, Outhouse confirms itself as one of our most exciting and stimulating theatre companies.
Marjan insists her students speak only English in class. Pedagogically, this is probably a sensible decision – but it brings to the fore the challenges of learning a new language.
When not attempting English, the characters are imagined to speak in their native Farsi. For the purposes of the play, Farsi is represented by the actors’ natural spoken English, while the language they are attempting to learn is represented by English spoken with an Iranian accent. Dialect coach Linda Nicholls-Gidley deserves congratulations for the cast’s successful navigation of this neat trick. And neat trick it is – because it effectively highlights that behind every accent you might find clumsy, or difficult, or amusing, is a person of equal dignity to you: equally intelligent, equally articulate, equally human.
(Digression: Farsi is what native speakers call their language. For a long time, English speakers called it Persian. There are some Farsi speakers who would prefer that English speakers returned to using the word Persian – because it would make clear to them that the language referred to is a continuation of that used in one of the great literary cultures of the world. Think Hafez, Omar Khayyam, Rumi. In what follows, I’m going to quote Rumi several times, but that’s my pomposity, not the play’s. The play derives its authority not from pretentious claims to erudition, but from the more difficult commitment to honesty, and to the hilarious and oh-so-skilful use of the vernacular.)
By an accident of geopolitics, a fluke of technological disparity, and the evil of man, the majority of the world’s people now speak, as their native tongue, a language they’re told is of secondary value. The play explores this phenomenon with exceptional humour, poignancy and insight.
Eighteen year old Goli hopes English will allow her to reinvent herself, and Minerva Khodabande is splendid in the role, capturing with comic excellence the awkwardness and optimism of youth.
Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world. – Rumi
As the unexpectedly competent English speaker Omid, a charming Pedram Biazar presents the psychological challenges of being caught between two cultures, and the quiet presentation of this oh-so-common predicament fosters the air of truthfulness that pervades the entire production.
Neveen Hanna as Roya powerfully evokes the ache of grief as a language difference divides her from her son. In one of the play’s many tear-inducing moments, she cries Why couldn’t you have given my granddaughter a name I could pronounce?
All language is a longing for home. – Rumi
Elham muses how different the world might have been if Cyrus the Great’s empire had survived and Farsi, instead of English, had become the lingua franca. Setareh Naghoni’s portrayal of Elham is marvellous: prickly, frustrated, resentful, but courageous in her determination to be loyal to who she is.
Nicole Chamoun as Marjan offers another wonderfully complex portrayal. She presents superbly the character’s pride in her bilingual ability and her commitment to sharing it, but threads through these qualities a strand of self-doubt, thin but thorny.
The scenes between Elham and Marjan are magic, and their gentle but firm refusal to tell us which character is correct is expressive of the sheer dramatic brilliance of this work.
Perhaps it’s through language we become who we are… or become anyone at all.
Or perhaps not. The play says nothing directly about the ineffable, the world beyond what can be spoken. But what work of literature can?
This is how it always is when I finish a poem. A great silence overcomes me and I wonder why I ever thought to use language. – Rumi
And, regarding the play’s conclusion, the spoiler rule also sanctions silence. It must suffice to say that it’s extraordinary. It will be experienced in different ways by different audience members, but it left monolingual me, once again, thinking of Rumi.
Not the ones speaking the same language, but the ones sharing the same feeling understand each other.
And this play is a glorious invitation to empathy.
Paul Gilchrist
Englishby Sanaz Toossi
presented by Outhouse Theatre Co. & Seymour Centre,
Two moments of theatrical wonder: The protagonist, Janina, encounters wild creatures. These creatures are portrayed by members of the ensemble. There’s no silly adornment to suggest their animal nature. The performers simply stand motionless, watchful, in a dignified silence. At another point in the story, Janina dresses for a costume ball. She takes on the mask of an animal. While in this costume, she does not speak. This is the emotional heart of director Eamon Flack’s inspiring adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel – the essential dignity of our silent cousins.
Set in modern day Poland, the story is a whodunnit, with the characters attempting to determine who is responsible for a series of murders. All the slain are hunters, and Janina asserts that it’s the animals seeking retribution. So, in addition to the whodunnit element, the piece also operates as a youdunnit, a gentle and forever entertaining invitation to consider our own treatment of animals.
The glory of this production is the characterisation and the theatricality.
Pamela Rabe plays Janina, and as both narrator and protagonist through three hours of stage-time, it’s a monster role of deep humanity. Bewildered by other people and outraged at their cruelty, Rabe’s Janina is a superb mix of humour and heart. Janina complains she is dismissed as a batty old woman, and thrillingly the script and the performance leave open whether her complaint is justified.
Staging is simple, but extraordinarily beautiful. There’s a revolve, a few small portable pieces evoking setting, and the trademark Belvoir style of rough magic: example, a snow storm is thrown from a bag held by an actor, a mini-leaf blower creates the flurry.
The work’s purpose is serious – the challenging of a complacent cruelty we tell ourselves is just plain reality. But the entire cast invest in a mischief that makes possible belief in change, a change our smaller natures would dismiss as miraculous.
Paul Gilchrist
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead from the novel by Olga Tokarczuk adapted by Eamon Flack
If you’ve passed through Australian drama, Australian literature, you know this place.
It’s a country town.
The townspeople are small, they are broken.
They have names like Killer and Runt.
The landscape is riven by a tension. On one side, the trivialities of human society: the servo, the takeaway shop. On the other side, the ferocious beauty of nature: the bush, the river, the sea.
In this place, you are an adolescent.
And, desperately, you need to leave.
These type of stories reflect the personal experience of some of us. But, for most of us, they function symbolically. They effectively express our deep dissatisfaction with modern Australia and its perception of what it is to be an adult, of what is a full human life.
I’ll admit, I often find these type of stories disappointing. It’s not that I haven’t felt the sense of being trapped they express, but I’m frustrated that they always seem to end right where I believe the story begins, at the escape. It’s as though the actual step into maturity is inconceivable, it’s representation impossible.
It’s as though this place seems to negate all alternatives.
But, with Eden, Kate Gaul not only shows she knows this place, she has understood it.
Gaul’s script tells the story of two teenage girls, trapped in this place. But her presentation pushes always to liberty and to openness.
Firstly, the voice. The girls tell their own story. Though there are moments of dramatic realism, the majority of the piece is direct address. We’re not served a purported factual picture; we’re spoken to by characters with agency, women in charge of their own narrative.
Secondly, the beautiful poetry. Much of this poetry is observational, in that Truth is the goal, rather than a reductive coherence. Of some pieces you can say This a beautiful gem, because it’s as though you can hold it up to the light, complete, and by turning it, and looking at it from different angles, you can see how the multiple parts fit together to create a single whole. Gaul’s rich poetry resists this; it’s not stone-solid, it’s fluid, like a moving body of water. (Example: the river that runs by the town is a motif that resists simple interpretation. Likewise, the title, Eden. If Paradise, is it irony? Or is this place the place of the Fall? Or is it where the story, all stories, must begin?)
Thirdly, the narrative. The town is initially established as a place of male misbehaviour and violence: a teen gang named the Mongrels marauds the streets; one of the girl’s fathers has left her mother for a younger woman; the other girl’s father is a wife-beater. But their escape? Honest admission: I didn’t understand the final fifth of the text, I didn’t understand what was happening. But what might lead to frustration with other pieces, is here a continuing invitation to openness. Freedom is that which does not slam shut.
Gaul directs her script magnificently. Simple staging forefronts the ever-fascinating language. Nate Edmondson’s soundscape powerfully underlines key moods and tonal changes (and, I suspect, could be listened to and enjoyed for its own sake.)
Actors Karrine Kanaan and Lara Lightfoot are splendid. They skilfully move between different characters, but it’s in the presentation of Gaul’s language that they particularly shine. This is poetry performed, rather than vernacular speech patterns imitated. This heightening is key. I suggested earlier Gaul not only knows this place, but understands it: it is a place of containment, of smallness, of perpetual reference to what-has-been rather than what-could-be. And if there can be an intimation of what follows the escape, it can’t be another tiny truth, but a flourishing – like this.
Written by Iris Warren and directed by Izabella Day, this is a cry from the heart against sexual violence and misogyny.
It’s also oddly structured.
There are three strands.
One strand is a series of scenes of comic realism. We witness the small chat between three high school girls, played by Natasha Pearson, Roisin Wallace-Nash and Warren. It’s funny, beautifully performed and wonderfully truthful. Perhaps there’s a little too much talk about sex (and there is the obligatory condom-on-the-dildo PDHPE exercise) but all this is thematically driven. Apart from being great fun, these scenes emphasise the girls’ innocence.
Another of the strands is a series of scenes of heightened language in which two of the young women look back – on their girlhood, and on its terrible ending. There’s regret at the loss of youthful simplicity. There’s historical references to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon and to the 1989 Montreal massacre of women. There’s musings on Fate, toyed with as an explanation of the inevitability of the change from girlhood to womanhood, but ultimately dismissed if it’s to be employed as an excuse for misogyny.
Between (and during) these two types of scenes we are shown, via projection, some of the violent lunacy written on incel forums. (I didn’t feel at all privileged to be given such glimpses into the smallest and darkest chambers of the diseased human heart… but perhaps some audience members need to see this sort of filth. Regardless, the creative choice allows for an explanation of the title: femoid is an incel neologism; combining female and android, it denies women their humanity.)
By the piece’s conclusion, we get clarification of what has occurred between the two dramatic time frames, between the two different series of performed scenes. Curiously, there’s only the smallest hint of an overlap between the two worlds: the men referred to in the school girls’ world are not presented as incels; and there’s no suggestion that anyone they knew is responsible for the horror that has unfolded.
At the simplest level, the piece is an outraged, bewildered reaction to sexual violence.
And there’s an extra element of misery. By the end, the young women have begun to echo the incels’ belligerent, martial language. Of course, every piece of theatre can’t be expected to offer a solution; sometimes it’s enough to record the trauma – which this powerfully does.
The tone is slippery, isn’t it? So says the director of the-play-within-the-play. He’s trying to avoid the director’s job of making decisions, but I felt the line wasn’t just satire, but rather an example of the text being self-referential.
When Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play was first presented in Sydney, I stayed away; the marketing had made it sound like some stupid sex comedy. When I finally saw it at New Theatre in 2025, I was more than pleasantly surprised. Yes, there were sex jokes (possibly too much of the one sex joke) but there was also a joyous profundity.
With Ruhl’s Stage Kiss I was expecting – hoping – for something similar: that the tone might be slippery.
Set in the world of the theatre, there’s wonderful humour. Much of it is parody of bad acting or of bad theatrical writing. In fact, there’s so much of this – like there was of the sex jokes in The Vibrator Play – I was hoping their very excess suggested this play was following what I had assumed to be the Ruhl method … and that soon a glorious profundity would manifest itself.
Someone critical of my approach to writing about theatre might say, that having seen the flowing life blood of the play, I wanted it to congeal.
(If it were to congeal, the clot would be something like this: the play is an interrogation into the relationship between Art and Life. While rehearsing a play, a terrible 1930’s melodrama, the protagonist reunites with her first love. Similarly, the character she is rehearsing reunites with her first love. Life, it seems, imitates Bad Art. In the second act, we get more of the same, except it’s a new-play-within-a-play, and this time it seems it’s more of a case of a Bad Life imitates Bad Art. The meta-play, Stage Kiss, follows in the grand tradition of warning against Art by using Art. Perhaps Cervantes started it with Don Quixote, telling the tale of the knight errant who tilts at windmills because the books he has read lead him to see them as giants. Austen picks up the baton with Northanger Abbey, in which her heroine – once again because of the books she’s read – sees monstrous gothic plots in the most mundane of circumstances. And pick a Fringe Festival anywhere on the planet, and there’s a good chance there’s a show in which a young actor outlines how they finally divested themselves of the nonsense they learnt from rom-coms or romance novels or similar rubbish. And, as well as the-plays-within-a-play structure, there’s another element of Stage Kiss that suggests Ruhl’s target is the spell of fiction: there’s a comically-heated-discussion about the concept of soul-mates. Now, the existence of soul-mates implies the existence of Fate, which more than implies that Life, rather than being a crazy bunch of stuff that happens, is actually a Narrative. The comically-heated-discussion in question considers Who it is who might be the author of such a meta-Narrative.
But, of course, all of the above is only for you if you’re the sort of person who likes your theatre to congeal.)
The flowing life blood of Stage Kiss is humour – and director Alice Livingstone’s production nails it. Livingstone has put together a top cast and elicits from them excellent comic performances.
Emma Delle-Vedove is hilarious as the bewildered protagonist. Jason Spindlow as her first love gives a beautifully funny portrayal of a kid-adult. Frank Shanahan as a cast member of the plays-within-a-play excels at that most tricky of tasks for a talented actor: employing your considerable skills to portray bad acting. Nicholas Papademetriou as the undecided director of the-plays-within-a-play is an utter delight.
Five rather different women meet to play netball. The focus is not so much on plot as character. (We’re not being asked to care who wins a game.)
You could read the piece as a representation of the female experience; the sort of piece with the raison d’etre of bearing witness.
And, if you do read it that way, you have very good reason. After all, over millennia, too much theatre has represented the lives and values of men, and this sort of piece seems an appropriate response.
The reason I’m not suggesting that it’s my reading of Emilie Collyer’s Contest is because I think it’s more dramatically thrilling than that. (When we say too many plays represent the male experience, we often make the mistake of thinking that was their conscious purpose. If it had been, the theatre created would never have had the cultural impact we rightfully complain that it’s had.)
Contest is thrilling, not because of its reportage, but because of its metaphors.
The metaphors are provocative, and threefold.
Firstly, we’re presented a team. Are we ever really a team? Do we pursue shared goals? Or are all our relationships purely transactional? And, if they are, of what are we robbing ourselves?
Secondly, the team plays in a competition. Is Life a competition? Is it really a zero-sum game, one in which my gain necessitates your loss? And, since so little of Life is actually played out on any field where comparisons could be made – our inner lives, for example – what’s the impact of our focus on competition? What is being erased?
Thirdly, it’s a sporting competition. Since sport is physical, we’re asked to what degree do we see ourselves as our bodies? There’ s probably no Life without the physical body, but there’s so much of Life in which we are unconscious of the body. How do we get the balance right?
I’ve outlined these metaphors without reference to the female experience, partly because I’m not in a position to evaluate their veracity or efficacy, and partly because the excitement of this piece of theatre derives not from being a representation, but from being an invitation. (As the above questions assert.)
Under the leadership of director Kirsty Semaan, the creative team make bold choices.
The soundscape by Charlotte Leamon is suitably tension-creating (though sometimes in performance it challenges the actors’ vocal work.)
The simple evocation of a court by designer Jason Lowe gives the performers a fitting place to play. (It would’ve been great to see the physicality pushed even more; netballers can really throw.)
Semaan elicits good work from her cast. Willa King effectively reveals the tension between authority and waning power. Emma Monk presents well the annoyance of being reduced to an inspiring anecdote. As the over-pleaser, Suz Mawer is both amusing and affecting. Lana Morgan gives a disquieting portrait of almost existential enervation. Melissa Jones takes a character who is almost resolutely shallow, and successfully unpacks her to give us a portrayal of subtlety and poignancy.
There’s something about this that reminds me of the experience of lying on your back and looking up into the night-time sky.
You know it’s beautiful, you know it’s deep … but you have to admit, after a while, that awe becomes tainted by alienation, and reverence begins its decay into indifference.
And then something shoots across the darkness, with a fiery life-changing radiance.
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets has plenty of lines that utterly light up the sky.
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality”
“In my end is my beginning”
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time”
Four Quartets is about our relation to Time, and our seeking, in the Here and Now, of …. something… be it Meaning, or Salvation, or Love.
It crackles with religious allusion: Arjuna and Krishna in the Chariot of Life; medieval mystic Julian of Norwich’s extraordinarily provocative ecstatic assertion “All is good, and all manner of things are good”; and the Christian symbolism of the fire, the dove, the rose.
By the time Eliot wrote Four Quartets, he was making his peace with Christianity, and the tension inherent in that most unusual of religious outlooks – that a particular historical event, the Incarnation, is the key to eternity – is a tension that charges the entire piece.
Though concerned with the mystical, it’s not a guidebook, not a-here-is-how-I-achieved-enlightenment sort of crow, but rather an utterly intriguing sharing of moments in the journey of a troubled soul. It feels like a riff on the beginning of The Divine Comedy.
Dante suggests
“Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark,/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”
while Eliot says
“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-/Twenty years largely wasted”
But, regardless of these musings on the spiritual, many people might feel that the fundamental question raised by this piece is whether it’s actually meant for performance.
After all, not every brilliant creation is. The Periodic Table of the Elements is a stunning human achievement, but I’m not sure I could bear it being recited on stage.
Eliot’s language is beautiful, but often abstract. Somewhere in the early 20th century, poetry seemed to relinquish its claim to be a spoken form and demanded instead to be read. Many of us will openly acknowledge that the only modern poetry we understand on first hearing is the type found inside a Hallmark greeting card.
But Eliot himself considered his work theatrical. In fact, some of the lines from the first quartet, Burnt Norton, come from a draft of his play Murder in the Cathedral (though, as Eliot admitted, ones the producer didn’t feel he could make work on stage.)
Four Quartets also has the challenge that it doesn’t present as a dramatic monologue. We’re not getting a definite character, like Prufrock. In fact, it’s not really clear if it’s the same persona speaking through the four sections. In this production, there are four different actors.
Am I saying it shouldn’t be staged?
Not at all.
Directed by Patrick Klavins, this production is fascinating because it explores the frontiers of theatre.
The staging is appropriately simple, allowing the language the pre-eminence it deserves.
It’s thrilling to witness the gifted cast (Sandie Eldridge, Grace Stamnas, Charles Mayer & Kaivu Suvarna) face the challenge of presenting this script: finding those moments of natural dialogue, which pop up like mushrooms after rain; gently delivering those moments where the abundance of the language threatens to overwhelm, like the deluge itself; and powerfully portraying despondency, when the clouds gather, and joy, at the sun’s final glorious appearance.
This one would be a challenge to make work: there’s only two actors, it’s 100 minutes long, there’s a huge number of short scenes, and it’s about athletics.
It does work, and gloriously so, thanks to skilful direction by Emma Whitehead and cracking dialogue by Ella Road.
Whitehead marshals a talented team to splendid effect, with projection by Aron Murray, lighting by EJ Zielinski, sound by Mitchell Brown & Osibi Akerejola, design by Kate Beere, and movement choreography by Cassidy McDermott Smith, all creating a pleasingly complete world of vitality and tension.
As Anne and Sophie, Rachel Crossan and Elodie Westhoff give terrific performances. There’s high-energy physicality and well-delivered humour, but also inspiring representations of strength and moving representations of vulnerability.
For most of the play it appears we’re being given a story of young female friendship, and we could do with more of these on our stages. And it passes the Bechdel test with flying colours; sure there’s talk of boys, but they’re far from the focus of these two young women’s lives – they live to run.
Or is it to compete?
That’s the twist. Competition is not inherent to friendship. There’s something frightening and threatening about competition being the backdrop to this relationship.
Until about 80 minutes into the show I was enjoying the richness of this representation of a friendship played out in an environment hostile to genuine trust and connection – and then it changed into a play about something else. Considering this change happens a long way into the action, to discuss it risks breaking the spoiler rule – but then the idea of rules and who gets to make them is one of the things the play tries to teach us, so I’m going to break it.
Read on at your own peril.
The play becomes a promotion of the argument that a neat binary concept of sex doesn’t fit reality. As one character says, the science isn’t reductive, but society is.
Does the play become didactic? We do hear from the other side. Aired is the view, that in physical competition, a clear binary division between the sexes is fairer. But the arbitrariness, and cruelty, of such a view is made apparent.
I found this change in what the play was doing frustrating, because matters of importance were being rushed. After one event, Sophie says she mistimed her race, that she’d left her run too late – and I think that’s the case here.
But that’s just a dramaturgical complaint (one I can guarantee is not shared by everyone.) There was another aspect of the play I found delightfully provocative.
The play explores the concept of justice in competition – but the two nouns in that phrase seem at odds. The first is an ethical term, and the other is, well … not. Or, at least, not obviously ethical. In fact, to some overly delicate souls, competition is downright problematic. I know we like to tell ourselves that human societies are fundamentally competitive – but are they? And should they be? Should we be encouraging competition? Is “Faster, Higher, Stronger” really a laudable goal? The fact the Olympic motto was updated in 2021 to include one more word – “Together” – highlights that there’s serious uncertainty about the valorisation of competition. Does the pursuit of justice in competition unwittingly justify a human behaviour that we’d be better off not justifying?
Or, more insidiously, does the pursuit of justice in competition contaminate the very concept of justice itself? Does it risk reducing justice to merely the right of every person to be considered better than other people?
As I said, delightfully provocative, thrillingly energetic and vitally important.
And how do we stop the problem arising in the first place?
Our culture assumes there must be simple answers to questions such as these. We’re certain of the destination, so there must be a path. Perhaps this attitude is a product of our hubris, or a result of the current fashion for self-righteousness. Or maybe it’s a consequence of something closer to universal, the spell of language: if you can formulate a question, then there must be an answer.
In Duncan Macmillan’s beautifully wise play there are no simple answers.
Fourteen year old Darryl is obsessed with violence. School staff member Tom doesn’t know how to help. And Rita, Darryl’s only remaining family member, desperately wants to pretend he’s just a normal teenager.
There’s a brilliant piece of dialogue between Tom and his partner, Jodi. (I’m probably paraphrasing, but this is its core)
Jodi: Who’s to blame?
Tom: No–one.
Jodi: Then what hope do we have?
Darryl also refers to this blame game.
Counter-intuitively, blame bestows hope. Blame assumes powerful dangerous forces could have been controlled, if only we’d done what was right. (As though perfection were possible in this sub-lunar world, as though we could return to Paradise after the Fall.)
Director Kim Hardwick’s production is excellent; aided by designer Victor Kalka and a splendid cast, there’s a pared back simplicity that lays bare the complexity of the human heart. (There is one simplicity – but more on that later.)
Campbell Parsons as Darryl is magnificent. Macmillan gives Darryl an incendiary idiolect – a hilarious, frightening language sourced from English working class slang and American gansta rap – and Parsons has utter command of this explosive mix. His portrayal of the troubled, piteous Darryl is an utterly fascinating and moving combination of a bouncy-youthful energy, a cynical- saddening understanding of power, and a heart-breaking innocence and self-doubt.
Having just jumped into the role a few days ago, Tony J. Black as Tom does great work, capturing the character’s struggle for patience, his bubbling frustration, and the terrifyingly all-consuming nature of the task of helping Darryl.
Romney Hamilton as Jodi gives a superb portrait of a beautifully imperfect human soul. Though creating a silly woman – one who too easily believes emotional outbursts are Truth – Hamilton still finds space to evocatively manifest the woman’s real need for companionship and security, and to express both her crushing fear and its all-too-common companion, anger.
Linda Nicholls-Gidley as Rita gives a gloriously rich performance. Confronted about Darryl, she’s defiant, even to obtusity, but also sharply loyal. And after a family loss, Rita has rediscovered her faith. It might be easy to dismiss this as mere rationalisation, and its manifestation – a fascination with angels – is cringey …. but its emphasis on Love is not. It’s the very heart of the piece. (Even Jodi, pondering the possibility that their first child might turn out another monster, asserts We will just love them more.)
So is Love the solution?
Once again, the same habit: a question expects an answer.
But, in the dark middle of the brutal wilderness that is Life, perhaps our chosen path is all the destination we can know.
Paul Gilchrist
Monster by Duncan Macmillan
presented by Tiny Dog Productions, in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre Co,
Theatre Red 