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.

Bell Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors

From his earliest plays, Shakespeare was transfixed by the ocean and its capacity as a catalyst for change and or rebirth. Plays such as The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Pericles and The Tempest are all infused with the rhythms and responses to such a vast unfathomable body of water such as the Mediterranean, and The Comedy of Errors is no different. One of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, The Comedy of Errors was written in 1594, and draws its inspiration from two of Plautus’ plays, Menaechmi and Amphitruo. However, Shakespeare – being Shakespeare – sees the inherent theatricality in Menaechmi’s separated identical twins, and doubles it, thus creating a scintillating whirlwind of farce, comedy, identity, tragedy and pathos and his now trademark humanity and warmth.

In Bell Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, however, the farce is perhaps overplayed, the action too breakneck, the whirlwind too impossibly fast that we lose sight of the people at the centre of Shakespeare’s play. A comedy in name and style, The Comedy of Errors – like every other of Shakespeare’s comedies – walks the knife-edge between comedy and warmth, and tragedy and sadness, and I couldn’t help but think there was something missing from Imara Savage’s national tour production for 2013.