Reviews

A strongly written new work, crafted by Scott McArdle, this edgy and moving coming of age story follows a pair of teenagers as they help each other deal with trauma.

Late one afternoon, young teens wander through the bush in an outer suburb. Lucy says, with some excitement, that there is a dying kangaroo bleeding badly from its guts. Arnold follows.

While it sounds rather disturbing, and deals with a slew of confronting issues, this beautifully told story is one of the best new works of the year, and a wonder to watch.

It seems only a minute ago that Chicago was in town, but in actual fact it’s been ten years since this vaudeville valentine played QPAC. In that time it has become the longest-running revival in Broadway history, and the longest-running American musical on Broadway, only surpassed by the Andrew Lloyd Webber behometh The Phantom of the Opera. It’s the musical for our age - big, brassy and vulgar with buckets of cynicism. Its satire of the ‘celebrity criminal’ hasn’t dated and seems even more relevant in this day and age of YouTube posts.

Sitting in the theatre next to a former psychiatric nurse, she was struck by how accurate the illnesses portrayed in the play were to real life. One “patient” in the drama was suffering from depression, another was bipolar, one suffered from an eating disorder, there is also drug addiction, pyromania, a patient afflicted by obsessive compulsive behaviour and another with a chronic shyness and social anxiety disorder. Any closer to home and my companion might have hopped onto the stage and completed a pill round. 

John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 play is set in 1964 in America, but it could have been set here or in the UK, or anywhere in Europe, because the ‘doubts’ it exposes about child abuse had been whispered about and covered up by families and churches and other institutions long before 1964.

Director Carla Moore suggests that the year is symbolic because it marks the introduction of the American Civil Rights Act and Vatican II’s more relaxed image of the Catholic Church – both symbolic of the fact that the 1960s was a time of political and social change.