Reviews

Theatre is meant to be intriguing, and the Tasmanian Theatre Company promotion for Nassim Soleimanpour’s play White Rabbit, Red Rabbit certainly was. I was approached to review the play, and some provisos, or cautions were given: don’t be a spoiler (don’t say what happened) and don’t be political, or at least, be sensitive to the politics.

If the Lancaster bomber you were piloting five miles over Sweden suddenly disintegrated in a flash of white light, would you have the wherewithal to think: “Now might be a good time to open my parachute”? Bruce Clifton did, surviving to be interviewed by Michael Veitch, along with about fifty other WWII pilots. A life-long aviation geek, Veitch compiled these into his best-selling history of combat aviation, Flak. For this show, Mr Veitch has adapted the five most remarkable of these stories.

It was a new theatre company, inside an almost new venue and cripes the man who wrote it, is sitting in the audience right in the middle of the third row. That would be enough to set the butterflies fluttering in the sturdiest of stomachs.

No wonder that afterwards one of the performers burst into tears off stage. It was prompted by the standing ovation led by David Atkins at the curtain call.

Fans of the evergreen Disney musical should not be put off by the fact that this is a youth theatre production. Most of the young cast deliver performances of astonishing depth and range, that are comparable to the work of professionals twice their age. Though the production values aren’t on the level of a Broadway show, they are still impressively polished for an amateur production.