Reviews

Three reuniting sisters focus involuntarily upon their joint history, examining their lives’ integrity and struggling with their difficult past and present choices and with what each is to the others.  By this means, Hotel Sorrento uses the sisters’ particular circumstances and characters to shed light on the Australian psyche as its playwright saw it at the time of writing.

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.