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Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House , u ntil Dec 12
When the siren sounded at a Gold Coast stadium nearly a decade ago, years of determination and courage finally paid off.
The first women’s AFL grand final was a game-changer for women.
Suzie Miller’s new play traces the development of AFLWculminating in that landmark 2017 match.
In the years since Miller attended that game, she’s become our most globally successful and influential contemporary playwright. Her legal dramas, notably the internationally acclaimed Prima Facie, have helped shift the public conversation around sexual assault and the justice system.
Her new play is a change of tack. She’s swapped the courtroom bench for the footy bench to tackle a truly Australian story.
The sporting code is a prism through which she considers the question of how women become visible in a system that has excluded them.
The play covers a lot of ground in its pacey 80 minutes, beginning in darkness with the voice of a little girl pleading for the chance to kick a ball. The play sprints through the key “firsts” along the way – the exhibition match, televised match and culminating in the grand final.
It has a docu-drama feel, with the three central figures lightly fictionalised but recognisable to anyone familiar with the AFLW’s origins. Most apparent is the character based on Sam Mostyn, the AFL’s first female commissioner and a driving force in AFLW’s establishment. In the play, she becomes lawyer Alison Newtown (Lucy Bell).
Alongside Newtown is police officer turned coach Bev Heath (Amber McMahon) and president of Women in the AFL Jane Hooper (Tara Morice).
The rest of the eight-member female cast play a range of roles, including AFL officials, a chorus of meathead male critics as well as female players. Miller economically reveals how each woman juggles competing demands from families, jobs and other responsibilities.
Particularly enjoyable is the lightbulb moment when the AFL bosses, long resistant to the idea of a women’s league, realise there just might be money, television audiences and merch in the game.
Along with the appalling sledging, fat-shaming and trolling that has greeted women’s efforts on the sports field, the revelation that until the early 1990s, female lawyers weren’t allowed to wear trousers in a courtroom was striking.
Much of the dialogue is delivered to the audience, with limited interaction between the characters, particularly early in the piece. That the women will triumph over adversity never feels in doubt, which undercuts the stakes and tension. The play is overly didactic at times, with Alison’s final speech telling what we’ve already been shown.
Director Sarah Giles’ energetic and vivid production is strong on humour and robust physicality. Kelley Abbey’s dynamic choreography enlivens what could otherwise be static sections, aided by Clemence Williams’ pulsing music and Brady Watkins’ sound design.
Bell and McMahon impress as galvanising figures determined to seize the moment, while Morice’s passion to enable women to play the game that she could not is palpable.
Women’s AFL has some distance to go before an equal playing field with male players is realised. Miller has delivered an uplifting celebration of women who dared to dream big.
Eternity Playhouse , until November 7
From the moment you take your seat at the Eternity Playhouse for Next Fall, the 2009 play by Geoffrey Nautts, you are witnessing these characters’ worst moments: there they are onstage already, sitting in a New York hospital waiting room amid the whirr and buzz of fluorescent lights and the background noise of a busy ward. It’s like we’re eavesdropping on their private hell.
Holly (Natasha Vickery) and Brandon (Jason Jefferies) are waiting for news about their friend Luke (Conor Fogarty) who has been in an accident. His parents, Arlene (Sophie Gregg) and Butch (Gerard Carroll), soon arrive, all southern accents and awkward racial stereotyping and distress; it’s clear they love their son. But when Adam (Luke Jacobz) rushes in to join the vigil, visibly and intimately distraught, there’s a new tension in the room. He’s clearly Luke’s partner. Luke’s parents clearly do not know this. In this life-or-death moment, who will count as family?
Through flashbacks, we learn the depth of this problem. Luke – sweetly funny, younger than Adam, an aspiring actor – is still deeply and faithfully Christian. Adam, an atheist, can’t wrap his head around it. How can Luke believe in something that hates the way he loves? How can Luke be so upset that Adam doesn’t believe in it himself? As we track the evolution of their five-year relationship in glimpses, this remains their biggest argument. There’s always a Bible wedged between them.
Concert Hall, Opera House, October 18
The best rock’n’roll feels like it could fall apart at any second.
Tim Rogers knows this, and You Am I’s frontman has expertly walked that fine line for nearly four decades – on occasion, tumbling down the wrong side in spectacular fashion.
Pulling off this trick backed with a wall of amps, a belly of booze and a wave of volume is one thing. Navigating that balance in the Sydney Opera House with an acoustic guitar, a seated audience and a four-piece string section takes the art form to a whole new level. You Am I are equal to the task.
Hayes Theatre, October 15, until November 8.
It’s official: you can now make a musical from anything, even a subject more suited to a trashy teen flick. And if you’re as talented a first-time director as Chiara Assetta, you can daub enough lipstick and mascara on it to disguise its many defects.
Preston Max Allen wrote the whole shebang: book, music and lyrics, and perhaps he should have shared the workload. The book is zany and sometimes quite funny, the lyrics intermittently share those qualities, and then there’s the music. Gulp. What do you say about an 18-song show in which only one tune differentiates itself from the rest? Can you imagine the inanity of Frederick Loewe writing the same musical style for Higgins as Eliza in My Fair Lady ? That’s precisely what Allen does here for all but one character.
The Tigers are a high school cheerleading squad that botched last year’s comp, and have assembled at the home of their captain, Riley (Brianna Bishop), for a sleepover to bond and rehearse. More is afoot than pizza and pompoms, however.
Reginald Theatre, October 14. Until October 31
Theatre can be trick, truth, ritual or mirror. Cruise is all of those and more. Penned by British playwright Jack Holden in 2021, it’s a love letter to London’s energised gay scene of the 1980s, to those who died of AIDS and to the “veterans” who survived.
It’s also a 100-minute play for one actor, and Fraser Morrison triumphs in this Fruit Box Theatre production, which, premiering at KXT on Broadway in Sydney last year, has rightfully received another airing.
The play is written in unmetered verse that, like Steven Berkoff’s finest work, catches the cadences of assorted idioms, without sounding forced. Holden’s exquisitely structured, multilayered story is derived from his experience volunteering for an LGBTQ helpline, and so the first of Morrison’s 31 characters (!) is indeed called Jack. He’s taking calls from people who are troubled, confused, depressed or barmy, and is too young, inexperienced and undertrained to deal with some – like the one who’s cutting himself while talking.
Sydney Event Centre, October 15. Until October 18
There’s a scene early in Spamalot , where a man wanders the streets of a plague-ridden town in medieval England pushing a cart piled with lifeless bodies, shouting “Bring out your dead!” Lancelot enters dragging a body, which struggles out of his clutches crying “I am not dead yet”. Cue music for a jaunty song and dance number.
“I’m not dead yet” is one of those classic Monty Python lines, greeted by laughs and cheers by a hyped-up fandom on the first night. But is there still life in the old thing? I’m not convinced.
Spamalot , subtitled “A new musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, was created by Monty Python original Eric Idle in 2006. It had a successful Broadway run, scooping up a fistful of Tony Awards. This Australian production, produced and directed by Drew Anthony, is a competent rehash starring Stephen ‘ The Castle ’ Curry as King Arthur and an enthusiastic all-singing, all-dancing ensemble.
