Unqualified

Before an over-insistent backdrop of Casual Jobs advertisements (‘Must be willing to wear coconut shells’) and on the setting for another play (Marjorie Prime), come two 30-something female actors with something to say. Between raising young families and all the stresses of feeding acting careers, Genevieve Hegney and Catherine Moore have snatched the time to write and perform Unqualified, the story of two women who start a temp agency with no extra employees. They’re on to a winner.

The play is based on an unproduced six-part television series which offers plenty of weight to proceedings, and features the real-life appearance of the ladies as huge leaflet-distributing lotto balls, waitresses in a hair-raising Western Sydney bogan wedding, and carers for a 103-year-old woman who didn’t quite last the night. You get the impression that there are masses of unqualified jobs out there.

They leave plenty of space to reveal their own backgrounds. Hegney’s Joanne Truebody was dux of her school, could have done anything except she was soon married to Stuart and crushed; Moore’s Felicity Bacon was trapped in her father’s butcher shop. The contrast between the two women couldn’t be stronger: Joanne is a confirmed vegan. ‘I’ve got nothing against sluts,’ she says.

Artistic Director Mark Kilmurry suggested Hegney and Moore transform the script into a theatre show, and the current manifestation appeared, ready to travel light. It shares the season, and so the setting, with another play. Simon Greer’s adaptation of the setting for Marjorie Prime is fine, except that the over-blown-up adverts tend to invade the action. 

Janine Watson directs proceedings, keeping well out of the way of her two jet-fuelled actresses. Scene changes are achieved to excerpts featuring that deeply unqualified prima donna Florence Foster Jenkins. They could be cut further because Hegney and Moore are, more often than not, ready and raring to go.

The world premiere at the Ensemble was quite a night. The audience rose as one and cheered.

Frank Hatherley

Photographer: Phil Erbacher