Reviews

Based in Yorkshire, North England on Christmas Eve and then Christmas Day, Gordon Steele’s black comedy allows us to share the Christmas festivities with the Bauble family and their young neighbours.

An argumentative, dysfunctional family, the audience is privy to the petty quarrels that have consumed the Festive Season for many years, which becomes a bit tedious by the end of the show.  The script is witty but often predictable.

Play 1 of the Ayckbourn trilogy begins at 1 o’clock on a sunny Saturday afternoon and Play 3 finishes at nearly 10.30 on a cool evening. I am quite ready for Play 4. Written in the early 1970’s in a rush of creativity, these three plays — designed to be seen in any order — stand as the peak of the author’s achievements (and he’s written over 80 plays), a brilliant, Chekhovian comedy of family manners. See them and be amazed.

Koorliny Arts Centre’s musical drama, End of the Rainbow, centres on Judy Garland’s comeback concerts in late 1968. A beautifully presented piece of drama, with a great singing performance, it is perhaps unsurprising that it is playing to sellout crowds.

Presented cabaret style in Koorliny’s smaller theatre, designer Jon Lambert transforms the compact stage into a London hotel suite, which in turn becomes a concert venue, revealing a hidden band. Director Brad Tudor’s costume design is an elegant and effective reflection of the era.

“I prefer to call it marriage equality. We don’t get ‘gay married’, we just want to get married like everyone else,” to paraphrase Craig Morrow, the young out gay man at the centre of David Atfield’s Exclusion. In many ways that is an essential truth about this play: it’s not gay theatre, it’s theatre which happens to have a few gay characters. Of course, being same-sex attracted has affected the lives of some of these characters profoundly, and in different ways depending on when they came of age.