Venture Theatre Company, celebrating its Golden Anniversary in 2025, has begun the year with a topical play. It shows the ongoing personal impact of the economic downturn. Principally, we see lay-offs, failed job applications and adult children coping with a return to the parental nest. It sounds serious, and it is. However, Don Zolidis’ script, adapted here to a contemporary Australian setting, brings lots of laughs to lighten the dark tone, and in the perverse way of satirical writing, that humour drives the messages all the harder.
The plot follows the fate of 30-something Lily Booker who loses her precarious job, tries for many more, gets a few job interviews and meets a potential life partner, Charles. All of this plays out while she is, perforce, once again living at home with her parents.
Much of the comic action in the play stems from the strange, often strained relationship Lily has with the parents, yet also relies on effective comparisons and contrasts with the other characters. In this production, Director Luke Atkinson-Copley chose a strong, balanced cast of six well-matched performers. That was essential for its success.
Emma Kinlock was natural, credible and engaging as Lily. She used the space well and related believably to the other characters. She did well to show Lily’s generation’s tolerant disdain for their parents, and made the most of her interactions with the four vastly different job interviewers. Further, she portrayed Lily’s sense of failure with sensitivity and empathy.
Both her parents, in different ways, wanted to reabsorb their child into the home, but, as if time had frozen, they treated her as the teenager she once was. The mother, Elaine, hilariously played by Kristy Pace, set the tone by listing the house rules she expected Lily to follow: midnight curfew and no boys in the house overnight, to name two. Much of the humour, and many of the best comic lines came from Elaine. Pace captured the gaucheness and satire of her character with confident ease. While she was uncompromising in her misguided expectations, Lily’s father Jim, nicely played by Colin Grace, was rather more conciliatory. He did well as the deadpan ‘straight man’ of the comic partnership, getting quite a few laughs out of his sturdy passivity.
Charles, the young man picked up by Lily in a bar, was enthusiastically and competently played by Brodie Stack-DeGroot. He added to the major theme by being in many ways a parallel to Lily. He, too, was an unemployed university graduate, forced by circumstances to be still living with his parents. Stack-DeGroot handled the awkwardness well, especially in the unsatisfactory steamy encounters with Lily.
Completing the compact cast were two other effective actors. Alexandra Treloar played The Women, several of them, all different and well-drawn. She had an arresting stage presence in all of her incarnations and gave each character a distinctive flair. David Giles, as The Men, brought us an extraordinarily diverse range of characters. In all of them he was exuberant and forceful, setting a stunning tone from his first entrance as the utterly flamboyant, unreasonably self-obsessed writer in the planning stages of a book-signing tour. He definitely commanded attention.
Venture Theatre Company has played in many venues over their fifty years. This production was in the Hallett Cove School’s Performing Arts Centre, a temporary but entirely suitable choice. It enabled the simple sets to be quickly established – Lily’s upstage bedroom, and other quickly assembled settings of various tables chairs, a bar, and even a cut-out Toyota. That suited the play’s structure well. The script was almost entirely a series of short scenes cross-cutting from those representing the unwelcoming outer world and those in the equally unsettling Booker household. While the cast and crew maintained the pace well enough, the script and therefore the action, slowed a little mid way through Act 2, repeating the main points without really adding to the purpose. The final scene, in the same book editor’s office as the play’s opening scene, brought a satisfying neatness with it, albeit with a very different ending.
This was a well chosen play for this company and for our times. It is a relevant reflection of the recent history and current state of our own community’s performing arts companies. They, too, are dealing with, surviving, at times thriving in, but never avoiding, the vagaries of the Current Economic Conditions.
