Reviews

Table Manners by Alan Ayckbourn is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  What better time then for Pymble Players to bring this play to the stage.  One of a trilogy of plays called The Norman Conquests, Table Manners follows the drama of a dysfunctional family over the course of a weekend.  Thrown together unexpectedly on this occasion, the relatives simultaneously loathe yet love each other, creating a familiar mix of comedy and drama that so often accompanies forced family gatherings.

During high school children become adults, and this play comfortably lays bare topics rarely discussed publicly but which are obsessed about between friends in high school. The journey of friends, Abbie (Georgie Heath) and PB (Fran Sweeney-Nash) is followed until they are counting down the days to when they finish school, get their own back on some teachers, have sex and work out what they will do next.

What a coup for Hunters Hill Theatre and director Elaine Hudson to stage this Australian premiere by Shout and Dusty playwright Melvyn Morrow! And to have Mr Morrow in the audience on opening night! It’s not often that a community theatre company realises such a double ‘coup’ – especially one which might be considered controversial!

In 2020, an extraordinary album of photographs was found of Noël Coward and his friends and lovers at his country retreat in Kent in 1931. Coward and cohort look relaxed and joyful, flamboyant and quite openly gay. But it was a life he could never have referenced in his public persona or his work, for obvious reasons. A core part of his very identity was illegal. Like writers in a repressive regime, Coward had to veil his reality without breaking social mores. This can be seen in Hay Fever, which Coward wrote with heterosexual couplings and a certain coyness.