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THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN PLAY ★★½
Previous Fitz Theatre, September 18 (till October 8)
You’ll be able to inform Kim Ho had enjoyable scripting this. At one level the playwright seems on a display, admonishing the screenwriting characters to remain nicely away from the story they’re making an attempt to pen.
It will be straightforward to say they need to have heeded this recommendation however there’s the slightest trace of the attraction of Luigi Pirandello at work, even when it’s not sufficient to avoid wasting the play.
5 writers, working for a brand new streaming service, brainstorm how one can inform Lasseter’s story: Lucinda Howes in The Nice Australian Play.Credit score:Phil Erbacher
Mythology obsessed, the piece centres on Harold Lasseter, who supposedly found a significant gold deposit close to Alice Springs greater than a century in the past. It begins with Lasseter, performed by Kurt Pimblett, delivering a protracted (and compelling) monologue, earlier than Ho cuts to the fashionable day: 5 writers, working for a brand new streaming service, are ineffectually brainstorming how one can inform Lasseter’s story, with a deadline speeding at them like a black prepare on a blacker night time.
Thus far, we’re following it, even when the lampooning of the inept and fallow writing periods misses a lot of the humour on provide. In Act Two, nonetheless, all bets of following a story are off. It turns into an oneiric, satirised melodrama about Lasseter’s household awaiting the gold-digger’s return, with the actors nonetheless often voicing ideas of their scriptwriting characters as if the latter have gone crazy of their desperation to write down the sequence.
Sequences are mysteriously repeated and characters touch upon being trapped within the play, or ask one another to cease talking in riddles. In the meantime the manufacturing turns into extra dreamlike, with reverb-treated voices, heroically over-the-top music and different oddities, as if somebody dropped LSD earlier than tearing into the second half.
Beneath stress: (from left) Might Tran, on-screen visitor Shari Sebbens, Rachel Seeto and Kurt Pimblett in The Nice Australian Play.Credit score:Phil Erbacher
Personally, I quite like being misplaced, whether or not in actual life or when partaking with weird comedy dramas. However as intelligent, well-written and amusing as this typically is, it flits between concepts with out ever correctly touchdown on them, so you may’t immerse your self in it. You solely intermittently join with it, and the play definitely by no means sinks its claws into you or envelops you in its tentacles.
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The adventurous Saro Lusty-Cavallari has directed it for Purple Line Productions. Actors Lucinda Howes, Rachel Seeto, Idam Sondhi, Might Tran and Pimblett play it with full dedication, even when they should have typically questioned what they’d acquired themselves into. Now, like their characters, they’re trapped within the play for the season.
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