100% HIT RATE
30 July 2026
The challenge for people going to live theatre is that it’s risky. It’s a complex art form and all sorts of things can go wrong. A new script may not hit the mark. An actor may have been miscast or just have had a bad night. The director’s approach may not serve the text. The lighting or sound or set or costume design might not appeal. And that’s before you consider issues such as stress from getting to theatre, a grumpy usher or toilet queues that go on for ever. Let alone the ticket price.
So I never have any expectations about plays I go to and try to avoid reading reviews in advance. If they work, that’s wonderful. And if that don’t, that’s the risk I’m willing to take by going in the first place.
Going to see three plays in a row on a recent visit to Melbourne wasn’t particularly brave. After all, I used to have weeks in London and New York when I’d see 8-10 shows in as many days. But this time was different. Every single one of them was great – even though the critics didn’t always agree with me.
The first play was a new one by columnist and comedian Marieke Hardy called Losing Face. It was an amusing satire about female friendship and the beauty industry. Three friends catch up for a 50th birthday at a health resort that also offers injectables and cosmetic surgery. Even with one of the actors on the book as a stand in for one who was ill, the show was entertaining and with all the best MTC elements of design serving the piece well. The fabulously talented Christie Whelan Browne played a tired mother living in the countryside, notable for her Gorman clothes. Madeleine Sami, who was wonderfully over the top in Deadloch was a gay woman trying to stay in form for her 30-something year old fiancé. The story just got more and more ridiculous as time passed with the audience laughing more and more. The reviewers uniformly hated it, giving it 2 stars and seeming to fail to grasp that it was an entertaining comedy. The full house indicated that word of mouth told another story.
The next night was another MTC show, this time a preview of
a new adaptation by Joanna Murry Smith of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Before
we arrived at the theatre, I’d been complaining that although Chekhov’s work is
usually described as tragi-comic, it’s rare to find a director or a translator
that finds the comedyin his writing. But in this case, I though that Joanna had done a
wonderful job in finding warmth and humour in this story of disappointment – in
life and love. In my group there was an 80 plus year old who’d seen five or six
productions of this play in his lifetime and someone who hadn’t ever seen a Chekhov
and both of them were entertained and moved by the production which looked glorious
with its golden birch trees. This time, most reviewers appreciated the pleasure
of this new production directed by MTC Artistic Director Anne Louise Sarks with
the exception of the Guardian reviewer who didn’t appreciate Joanna’s take on
the play. Their loss.
My final Melbourne excursion was to the Fairfax Studio (which still has the seats I chose for it in 1994) to see another new Australian play, Mackenzie by Yve Blake, directed by Virginia Gay and presented by Bell Shakespeare. It’s a brilliantly witty take on the Macbeth story but set in a TV studio during the making of a program for teenagers. The pushy show mother is Lady Macbeth with wonderful lines such as “out damned sun-spot” while the 13 year old Mackenzie plots the downfall of many around her in order to become the world’s best TV star. She’s overcome by someone not of woman-born – because their parents were non-binary. Witty, clever, laugh-out-loud show with Bell Shakespeare selling pink merch for the first time. Standing in the ladies’ toilet afterwards, the proud mother of the lead actor, Kimberely Hodgson, announced herself. She was thrilled that we had all been thrilled, telling us breathlessly that her daughter wasn’t really 13, she was actually 34. Not a detail I’m sure Ms Hodgson would have liked broadcast but you can’t hold back the enthusiasm of a mother.
Three well directed, well performed, well written, well-designed
plays. What more could I ask for?
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