Maggie Stone

Successfully premiered in Adelaide in 2013, Caleb Lewis’ play ambitiously explores how wealth, debt and charity can strangle real empathy for those to whom we lend or give.

Maggie Stone is an opinionated, bigoted loans officer who lives alone with a lizard. In that jokey Aussie way, Maggie is a suburban racist; but she learns a lesson after the death of an African immigrant whose desperate request for a minor loan she’d rejected.  

Made uncharacteristically vulnerable from a heart scare, she sets out to help his widow, Mrs Deng, and an angry teenage son.  But whether it’s international aid or a helping hand like Maggie’s, strings are always attached.

Eliza Logan gives a nuanced portrait of the amusing if hard-headed Maggie and Anna Lee is hilarious as Mrs Deng’s friend from the church, whose charity is as boastful as it is limited; while Alan Dukes lurks in the shadows as a sinister loan shark.

Yet Lewis’ big themes around debt, personal and financial, are undersold in Sandra Eldridge’s production because key storytelling moments between the characters aren’t punctuated dramatically.

The play seems overly splintered, even as though scenes are missing, and Sallyanne Facer’s long walled set, of large ship containers studded with front doors, is symbolic enough, but leaves little room for deep action.

Branden Christine is underpowered but true as Mrs Deng and Thuso Lekwape ably plays both her husband and son; while Kate Brookallil is effective as the Syrian Australian shopkeeper just trying to stay in business.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Robert Catto