Reviews

Jordan Best again demonstrates her comedy skills with this wonderful adaptation, which is about as far from the 1999 overblown, unfunny movie version as it’s possible to get. With flawless timing, Best coaxes energetic clowning from her actors. The cast includes several CAT Award winners and Q favourites, such as Jenna Roberts stealing scenes as a sexy, frustrated Helena chasing Duncan Driver, who transforms Demetrius into a slack-jawed mouth-breathing twit.

The stage is a cluttered attic hunkering under wooden beams. Old suitcases line one wall, cardboard boxes the other. Worn, rejected pieces of furniture and forgotten toys litter the space. “There are stories here,” the set suggests, “memories and history.” And as the title and notes from Director Carla Moore imply, the stories go way back to the late 1930s, to Germany, and the terror and violence of the anti-Semitism that crytalised with the Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

Going in you think you know what to expect, a lot of rhetoric, a lot of yawn-inducing ramblings and skewed political arguments. But what you actually get is quite different.

This is intriguing and compelling theatre. The Hansard Monologues is the perfect example of just how entertaining verbatim theatre can be when it has the appropriate subject matter at its core - which in this case is the life of the 43rd Parliament.

Tasmanian Theatre Company’s production And No More Shall We Part is a poignant story of living, loving and leaving, played with searing honesty by Joan Murray and Guy Hooper. Pam and Don have had a long and successful marriage. Now, Pam is dying, and the couple have to deal with her departure and her choices. Dying with dignity and euthanasia are topics for discussion, and, eventually, legislation. The import of the subject is made all the more moving because of the ordinary language of the writing, and the lack of pretension and absence of melodrama of the production.