The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race

It’s 2019 in the little town of Appleton in the Southern Highlands and the annual show is coming up.  The big event is the Potato Race.  The blokes run around the oval hefting 50 kilo bags of spuds (potatoes are the main crop in Appleton).  The girls heft 20 kilo bags.  The race committee – Bev Armstrong (Shayne Francis), President and implacable conservative, and Barb Ling (Margot Knight), Secretary, sweetly reasonable, the peacemaker – have things well in hand.  But hometown girl Penny (Sharni Page) has just come back to be the town’s GP.  When she finds out that the Potato Race prizes are $1000 for the blokes and only $200 for the girls, she’s going to do something about it...

That’s the set-up for this warm, funny play about how difficult it is to change, well, anything.  In 2019, ‘equality’ was just that bit more difficult to achieve.  The play’s Director and Producer Mark Constable calls it ‘a love letter to the women of country Australia’.  And so it is.  Reminiscent of Aiden Fennessy’s Heartbreak Choir, this play dramatises the way a bunch of disparate women can argue, bitch, but also bond and stand up together to change things.  And it’s not how blokes do it.

Constable’s pacey direction brings out all the variations and detail in this great, well-chosen cast who then bring to life playwright Melanie Tait’s representative cross section of Appleton’s women.  These five characters could so easily have been types, but Tait sketches in just enough background and detail so that we understand where they’re coming from. 

As well as Bev and Barb, there’s immigrant Rania (Sheila Kumar) who wants to fit in – but fitting in was what you had to do where she came from.  Feisty is too mild a word for irascible, outspoken Nikki (Sophie Cleary), who wins the race every year, and also works two jobs (barmaid and hairdresser) to keep herself and her kids afloat.  Dr Penny – a (gasp) lesbian – is immediately dubbed a meddling blow-in do-gooder feminist by Bev Armstrong, despite Penny having been brought up in Appleton, practically as Nikki’s sister, by good-hearted, too-generous-for-her-own good Barb Ling.  All these performances are sharp, clear and funny. 

A scene where Nikki barracks at the footy, abusing the ref, while arguing with Penny at the same time, is brilliant, a tour de force that leaves us – and Sophie Cleary – breathless.  Watching stone-faced Bev grudgingly rethink a few things – as well as discovering Rania’s goat curry is not so bad - is very moving.  Nikki’s realisation that women can play sport – like the blokes – and not just muck around is exhilarating.

It all happens on Michael Jewell’s all-purpose timber set with his lighting and moving a few chairs around accomplishing the fast-moving scene changes.  David Heinrich’s sound design supplies the voice-over local radio station as well as the pub hubbub, the crowd at the footy, the media uproar as Penny’s campaign gets world attention, and the noisy anticipation before the big race... 

The Mountview Theatre, we should say, is fully equipped, seats only 100, and is the home of the multi-award-winning Mountain Players.  The Appleton Ladies is the first independent production at the theatre, slipping into a hiatus in the Mountain Players’ most interesting, varied program.

As to who wins the potato race – and how – you’ll have to get a ticket – if you can.  Mark Constable plans to take the show on tour – if he can.  This play is a natural and transportable and would play in country towns all over Australia as it does in little Macedon.

Michael Brindley  

Photographer: Kathryn Tollerud