Week 42/2024: A weekend of theatre

Week of 14 October 2024

I went back to work after two weeks holiday. It wasn’t too bad.

I also made my first photoblog post from the Art Deco walk, which I wrote about in week 39. You can find that post here.

Theatre performances

My 2024 theatre goal

At the start of this year I set myself an unofficial target of attending twelve live theatre shows in 2024.

It wasn’t that difficult to do in the end, considering I’d booked five shows in November last year when the Theatre Royal program was released. Kramstable was in four shows this year, so it was just a matter of finding three others that I wanted to see.

Here’s what I saw in the first eight months of the year.

1. January: Pinocchio (Big Monkey in the Botanical Gardens)
2. January: As You Like It (John X Presents Shakespeare in the Gardens)
3. January: This Is Our Youth (Golding & Tooker at the Theatre Royal Studio Theatre)
4. February: Last Cab to Darwin (Hobart Repertory at the Playhouse Theatre)
5. May: The Rockliff Horror Show (Uni Revue at the Theatre Royal)
6. May: Twelve Angry Jurors (Pepperberry Theatre at the Peacock Theatre)
7. May: Love and Information (Hobart College)
8. May: Hacktivists (Hobart College)
9. June: Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Bad Company Theatre at the Peacock Theatre)
10. June: Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (Theatre Royal)
11. August: The Visitors (Moogahlin Performing Arts and Sydney Theatre Company at the Theatre Royal)
12. August: Stranger Sings! The Parody Musical (Hobart College)

Wait! I met my goal in August and didn’t even realise? So much for keeping track in my head. And here I was this week thinking Friday night’s show was number 12.

So, on we go:

13. September: The Shape of Mind (O’Grady Drama at the Peacock Theatre)
14. October: Comic Potential (Hobart College)
15. October: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Hobart Repertory at the Playhouse Theatre)

The last two I saw this week.

Comic Potential

Comic Potential was the play Kramstable’s Theatre Performance class put on for their end of year assessment. I went to see it on Friday, which was the final show before their assessment performance on Saturday.

It’s written by Alan Ayckbourn, a British playwright who has written 90 full-length plays. (Ninety!)

The play is set in a television studio where android actors (‘actoids’) are used in place of human actors.

A once-great film director is directing the show, which gets interrupted when one of the actoids, JCF 31333, develops a glitch and starts laughing. The nephew of the studio owner, Adam, arrives, seeking to learn from his hero, the fallen director. Eventually, Adam and ‘Jacie’ as he calls JCF 31333 are left alone in the studio, and it starts to get very tangled indeed.

It was a fantastic play and I laughed a lot. I’m not sure how the cast managed to keep a straight face in some of the scenes. And while Kramstable only had a small role, he did a great job with it, and I hope he did just as well in the assessment run the next night.

It felt weird knowing this would likely be the last time I saw him perform on that stage.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Saturday night, I moved to a much bigger theatre, The Playhouse, to see Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. This is a play I’ve seen mentioned in many theatre-related text and forums. It’s a classic Australian play which is considered one of the most significant pieces of theatre in this country. Written by Raymond Lawler, who died earlier this year aged 103, this play “changed the direction of Australian drama”, according to the play’s program.

It’s set in suburban Melbourne in the 1950s and everything about it, from the characters, to their striking accents and language, to their stories, is Australian. For this reason, it hasn’t translated well internationally.

Even though I’d heard of this play because it’s so well known, I didn’t know what it was about, so I was really excited to finally get to experience this highlight of Australian theatre. It took me a while to figure out what was happening, but once I did, I was engrossed in the story, from the funny parts, the serious parts and the excruciating ending. (I don’t do spoilers but if you know you know. I actually felt pain.) The cast was fabulous and it was a wonderful night of theatre.

Seeing live theatre performances always inspires me to try and develop my own acting further, and I’m even more excited about the play my acting class is preparing now.

Week 42 summary

Habit tracker

• 15 minutes exercise sequence in the morning (7 days): 6/7 days (one was at night)
• Hip extensions (7 days): 7/7 days
• Go outside before 8 am (7 days): 7/7 days
• 2 walks or bike rides or a combination (6 days): 5/6 days
• Long walk (1 day): 1/1 day
• Walk 8,000 steps (7 days): 7/7 days
• Evening exercise sequence (7 days): 5/7 days
• 9.00 shutdown (4 days): 4/4 days

What was the best thing about this week?

A weekend of wonderful theatre.

What did I notice this week?

I paid attention to the shapes in this scene.

I need to go back with my zoom camera and play with it some more.

What did I learn this week?

I learned if you send someone a letter attached to an email and you want someone to read a related document, send them that document. Don’t hyperlink the thing they need to read in the attachment and assume they’ll know they need to look at it.

What am I reading?

• What Follows … : A ghost story by JamesMcLachlan