Reviews

I have often seen Andrew McGrail perform for GSOV, but this is the first time I’ve seen him direct and I was impressed. It’s difficult to find something new to add to this old warhorse, but Andrew certainly did that.

It opened with a prologue taken from the film “Topsy Turvy”, detailing the events that led up to the creation of The Mikado. Sullivan, naturally, was played by the MD, Timothy John Wilson, who then took his place in the pit. It was interesting, but I’m not sure it added that much.

Unlike the murder – mystery novels, which are part of our folklore, and for which Agatha Christie is famous, The Unexpected Guest was written as a play and was first performed in 1958. Although not as well known as her play The Mousetrap, it still offers an intriguing plot that keeps the audience absorbed to the end. It starts on a foggy night when Michael Starkwebber enters the home of the Warwicks through a window in the study. He finds the dead body Richard Warwick and Richard’s wife holding a gun that supposedly killed him.

Annie Baker’s The Antipodes is set in a television ‘writers’ room’.  Having spent a great deal of time in ‘writers’ rooms’ in my career, I wondered how Ms Baker would depict such a thing.  It wasn’t going to be how, say, David Mamet would depict it.  It turns out that her ‘writers’ room’ bears only tenuous resemblance to any real writers’ room in which I have worked – or indeed to any I’ve heard or read about. 

A portion of Osamah Sami’s 2015 memoir Good Muslim Boy has previously been adapted into the successful movie Ali’s Wedding; now this play adaptation takes another part of the book, perhaps the most moving sequence of events in it, the sudden death of his cleric father while on a pilgrimage to Iran and his efforts to bring the body back to Australia against insurmountable obstacles.