Reviews

There has been so much real life drama swirling around the Royal Family this year that my first thought about this production was that Gerry Connolly wouldn’t know what material to leave out. Indeed, when I had the good fortune to sit next to him earlier this year, at another production, he quipped that he had a truck load of material to sort through.

However, much to my surprise, there was only a sparse reference to Harry and Meghan (nobody asks me how I’m doing) Markle and the sad plight of Prince Andrew in this production.

The Ensemble Theatre is packed to the gunnels. Its favourite son, the writer David Williamson, author of over 50 plays, 24 plays staged here, watches as the lights come up on the very last, Crunch Time. After 50 years of play writing, this is officially the end, finis, the final curtain. He put down his pen 11 months ago ‘and I haven’t missed it one little bit’. 

The ‘butterfly effect’ is where a small change at a point in time creates a significant change in the outcome.

A Butterfly Effect is a frustrating sixty minutes observing four people stumble through a wandering commentary on their character’s lives.

The ingenuity in this production of Wilde’s most famous farce is not in its re-interpretation of the text but in its capacity to fully expose all the underlying allusions. Jon Haynes and David Woods, renowned for their comedy work with the independent theatre company Ridiculusmus, set themselves an almost impossible task. The two comedy actors take on all the parts in the play, executing some very demanding and often challenging costume and character changes. The result is hilarious, enthralling and induces side-splitting laughter.