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.
Written late in
his career, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s
Tale is perhaps one of the stranger of his plays to wrap your head around.
Essentially comprising of two very disparate genres – heightened tragedy c. Othello, and bawdy pastoral comedy c. As You Like It – it, today, works on an
emotional level more than a dramatic level, and pushes the boundaries of what
is possible on stage, both in the Elizabethan theatres and on contemporary
stages. Deriving its title from the Elizabethan storytelling mode reminiscent
of a fairytale, The Winter’s Tale is
classified as one of the Romances
by twenty-first century critics. While the term ‘Romance’ derives from the
Greek stories from the
second and third centuries AD, these stories were, for the Elizabethan and
Jacobean audiences, merely continuations in a rich vein of storytelling; usually
episodic, they utilised the processional ‘quest’ motif, and generally involved
perilous journeys and final (impossible) recognitions and reunions.
Presented here by Bell Shakespeare, The Winter’s
Tale is one of Shakespeare’s less performed plays throughout the world,
perhaps because of its stylistic confusion. Directed with warmth and colour by
John Bell, this production is enchantingly set inside a child’s bedroom, that
of Mamillius, the son of Leontes, King of Sicily. Created out of white
curtains, a white bed, and white floor, the austerity and winteriness of its
design gives way to gorgeous washes of colour, deep blues and purples, vibrant
pinks and yellows and ceruleans. The story unfolds very much from Mamillius’
point of view, yet for all its ingenuity and enchanting cleverness, something
doesn’t quite sit right with this production.
