Reviews

Kay Proudlove brings to Adelaide her stories of growing up in New South Wales. Her teenage diary is the source of tales from personal Spice Worlds to underage drinking, first crushes to first guitar, sharing her tender, naïve, and sometimes painful memories with us. Proudlove’s infectious personality brings us close, and there’s plenty of knowing chuckles with the familiarity of growing up in the nineties, being worried about the shape of your body, desperate for certain boys to notice you, and how there’s always a girl who seems to have it all figured out.

This satiric black-as-black and very funny farce could scarcely be more timely.  But the producers, Hannah Greenwood and Tilly Legge, say that’s fortuitous.  They were already in rehearsal before the 2024 US election and ‘No matter what administration is in charge,’ they say, ‘idiocy is bipartisan.’  Be that as it may, they’ve found no reason to amend the script, and no one is going to watch POTUS without thinking of the dangerous circus occurring right now in the real White House.

The Old Fitz is not the underground theatre you usually go to for high quality productions of 90-year-old, carefully constructed Broadway plays presented uncut. Yet here is Lillian Hellman’s 1934 major theatrical work presented as part of the 2025 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival – with a large and excellent cast probing deep into the text under the assured guidance of director Kim Hardwick.

Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense is a play inspired by the works of P.G. Wodehouse and brings some of his iconic characters to life. As the title suggests, the play offers a great deal of facetious fun. Its structure is of particular interest as part of the humour is the way it draws attention to theatrical devices. Set in the 1930s the play within a play is narrated by Bertie Wooster (Daniel Trenkovski), who is assisted by the butlers, Jeeves (Sam Howard) and Seppings (Gavin Baker).