Reviews

Adrift is cross section of contemporary life with all its debilitating doubts, dangerous certainties, embedded anxieties, niggling frustrations, necessary evasions and misplaced rage.  Or, as Freud put it, ‘civilisation and its discontents’.  In snapshot grabs, the characters are locked in combat.  Most demand that others change – for their own good.  The conflicts are absurd – but not that absurd. 

Worstward Ho is not a play, it is ‘prose’ – that is, not written in 1981 as a play to be performed by an actor.  Robert Meldrum and Richard Murphet thought otherwise and over three years, they have been ‘decoding’ (Murphet’s term) it so as to render Beckett’s difficult text clear in performance – but without diminishing its difficulty.

Tea Tree Players are known for their farces, so this year is an experiment to gauge audience reaction to other forms of theatre. Their first production was a fruity melodrama, now The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race, a comedy with messages of equality and inclusivity. Later this year they will present the landmark Australian play Cosi, finishing up the year with A Vicar of Dibley Christmas - The Second Coming (plus a Youth Theatre production and a pantomime). The general public are certainly getting more than their money’s worth!

Though I couldn’t get to this production earlier in its run, it was one I was determined to see. There is no theatre more important than that which exposes wrong and inspires reaction.