Reviews

With his comedy After Dinner acclaimed Australian playwright Andrew Bovell takes us on a step back, to a time before social media and mobile phones, when if you were looking for love you had to drag yourself out of the house to the local pub or nightclub.

Designer Jonathon Oxlade has done a fine job in capturing the pub dining room of the 80s for this State Theatre of South Australia production; from the apricot tablecloths to the single fake carnation placed in the centre of each table, from the wood panelling on the walls to the insipid pale green carpet.

It’s a risky title – and could prompt a one-word review.  Fortunately, Fiannah de Rue’s show is funny.  What isn’t funny (usually) is death.  This show is, she says, her response to the recent death of her beloved larrikin father, as in, ‘You have to laugh…’  There isn’t, in fact, a lot about her Dad in the show, although there is a running gag about his ashes and a brilliant sequence about the wake she organised and supervised to ensure that it stayed sad.  Watching her patrol the wake and remind pe

When the town Salem is mentioned, most people think of the witch hunts of 1692/93 in what is now the state of Massachusetts, USA.  The mass hysteria based on rumour, revenge and a fanatical belief in the Puritan religion led to the execution of over twenty innocent people. Arthur Miller has taken this historical event as an allegory of what was happening in 1953, when the play was first performed, with a similar witch hunt for communists under the guidance of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The raked seating of the Reginald Theatre is mirrored by a similar rake of red plush seating. Red and black cinema style carpet stretches up steps to an aisle. Above it, in a high, dark-curtained wall are the windows of the projection box of The Flick, a cinema in Worcester, Massachusetts. Both theatre and cinema black out simultaneously. Loud music heralds the credits of a movie. Lights come up on the empty cinema, littered with spilt popcorn.