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From reviewsgate.com
3 November 2005
by Alan Geary
Reviewsgate review
Not so much a play within a play as a soap outside a
soap. It bears comparison with Stoppard.
It takes a minute or two to click into this one. At
first you think that the actors are a bit soapy.
Andrea McEwan, for instance, as Elaine, indicates
agreement by shaking her head and looking puzzled, the
way they always seem to do in soaps.
But then you realise that James Griffin's ingenious
contrivance isn't just a play within a play, which
would be all in a day's work. It's not even a soap
within a soap. It's more of a soap outside a soap -
and they're both Australian.
The soap in question, the inner one, is Heart of
Hearts, a turgid example of that genre set in St
Celia's Hospital - we get to see nine wonderfully
funny snatches of it on a giant video screen in which
the main actors double as the screen stereotypes.
Craig Parker is particularly adept at this. He's
completely convincing as nerdy-looking writer Matt and
uproariously so as the OTT ham playing an improbably
hunky character on screen.
But the real action happens in the writers' room; the
other half of the comedy springs from the fact that
the back-stabbing shenanigans of the writing team are
soapish. They all seem to have been in and out of
broom cupboards with everyone else, two of them are
divorced and there's at least one lesbian
relationship.
In fact, sex is the sole topic of conversation when
they're not working, which is most of the time.
Perhaps for this reason, Hearts has hit the ratings
rocks. Solution? - axe stock heart-throb Doc Gilligan,
played by Andrew Lomas, played by Ben Steel. Trouble
is Lomas doesn't want to take an early bath.
Steel is seriously good as Lomas: he captures all the
vain gesticulating and self-obsession that the layman
[not the critic!] associates with actors.
As in all the best soaps, there's a bolt-on
cliff-hanger to ensure that we come back after the
adverts. er. interval. And it's in the second half
that Mark Little, as Alan, makes his part come alight,
with a long philosophical speech about the
relationship between fiction and reality as he prowls
around the huge writing table, when all along we've
seen him as a cynical serial womaniser.
It seems aeons ago since down-under was regarded here
as a cultural backwater. The play bears comparison
with some of Stoppard, and this production does it
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