Reviews

As the title suggests, this play gives the audience a chance to hear, and see, what goes on offstage during a performance. Full of innuendo and fast-paced physical comedy, this is a show for those with a penchant for old-school British comedy. What begins as a series of close calls, deteriorates into outright disaster. It is every theatre person’s worst nightmares jam packed into one show.

This interplay between various levels of society in a sea of gossip and scandal which causes both outrage and indignation makes for an interesting interpretation of this play, first produced in 1892.  Wilde set the play initially in London but director Greg Scurr has it in Brisbane in the summer of 1954. This meant the audience could relate to their own town, understand the accents and know the music played for background and atmosphere. For the most part, it worked well.

I remember when I was a child my mother or father used to read to me every night. It was one of the highlights of my childhood. Enoch Arden is a welcome return to those days. It is story-telling for adults, heart-rending and sophisticated.

It’s taken a while but this is Louis Nowra’s final play in his loosely autobiographical trilogy, after Summer of the Aliens about a boyhood in a Melbourne housing commission flat and Cosi about directing Mozart in a mental asylum.

Here in the downstairs theatre of Sydney’s Old Fitz, we meet supposedly the same locals with whom Nowra has been drinking upstairs for the last decade.  In fact, Nowra spent the premiere of This Much Is True not with us but in the front bar in his usual place of inspiration.