Still single: STC's After Dinner

Written in 1988, After Dinner is Andrew Bovell’s first play. Set in a suburban pub bistro, five single thirty-somethings meet after work for Friday night drinks and a meal, and their very individual personalities and circumstances collide in an achingly brutal riot of sex, misdirections, and variations on the idea of friendship.

Best known for his plays such as When The Rain Stops Falling, Speaking in Tongues (later filmed as Lantana), Holy Day, and the recent adaptation of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, Bovell is increasingly drawn to the turbulence and tumult of daily lives, the dark and gripping mysteries which lie concealed beneath a veneer of normalcy in each of our lives. Written when he was just twenty-one, After Dinner lacks his trademark finesse and subtlety; everything here is dialled up larger than it should be, all seems to be turned well past naturalism into a kind of crude grotesquerie. Presented here by the Sydney Theatre Company, it is one-hundred minutes of painfully coarse and blunt banter between the five lonely hearts, as their Friday night quickly deteriorates into a night none of them would want to remember in a hurry.

The laugh time: Belvoir’s Is This Thing On?

Billed in the season book as a “kind of Don Quixote for the female comic,” Zoë Coombs Marr’s Is This Thing On? is the story of one woman’s journey as a stand-up comedian. As we follow her career from her awkward first gig to her mid-career crisis and her eventual comeback some years later, not only do we see a character and person grow, but we also see Coombs Marr’s skills as a writer become apparent, because Is This Thing On? is essentially five overlapping and intersecting comedy routines, performed by five different actors, in five different moments in time.