Amanda Muggleton in The Book Club

Amanda Muggleton in The Book Club photograph by Casey Wong.

‘How does she do it?’ was the question reverberating through the exalted audience as it departed from Amanda Muggleton’s performance in The Book Club. There’d been no holding some of them throughout, often one jump ahead of ‘Deb’ and her invisible Book Club members. Men and women alike answered the questions she threw at them, anticipated the replies she wanted and two even managed to have themselves invited into the ‘living room’ to receive an appreciative hug from the charming, talented, yet humble Muggleton at the end of the show. What a trooper! No Book Club will ever be the same and all through the incredible versatility of this award-winning actor still looking as young and energetic as in her first performance of this play 17 years ago.

No doubt Muggleton’s training in music, drama and dance in London gave her solid grounding and she certainly used all three in this performance. But it’s her multifaceted personality that has you riveted from the first moment when, nestled on the lounge in her bare feet, she reads aloud a few lines from ‘the book of the day’, until the end when she reminds you of her mother’s words – ‘no matter what happens in life, there’s always a good book!’ In that time she has brought multiple characters, conversations and emotions to life with a miming talent that would make Marcel Marceau smile and, clearly, touched the hearts of many of her fans.

The Lawler Theatre, seating only 150 people, resembles The Ensemble in Sydney, where Muggleton won the Norman Kessell Memorial award for best actor in this play in 2015. It is the perfect, intimate venue and the design of the room. by Shaun Jurton, enhances it beautifully with a wall of books, a treadmill, brightly coloured cushions, a rug and a table for the assortment of ”culinary triumphs” contributed by the incumbents.

I have to ask this question though! As this play, written by Roger Hall, has been noticeably ‘upgraded’ by Rodney Fisher, why wasn’t a male included as a member of the book club, as there are certainly more who attend them today?

The inclusion of a male writer to fulfil Deb’s sexual fantasies and release her from the frustration of a dull marriage, gave Muggleton enough scope for a range of expressions, delicious, fun, cheeky and erotic, to have the audience convulsed in laughter, but the episode seemed to me a tad too long in proportion to the basic tenet of the play and some of the wisecracks, a bit too contrived.

There can be no criticism of Muggleton – she is the consummate performer for every one of the 90 minutes. It does indeed make you wonder how she does it! If she missed a beat, you’d never notice because she is so skilled at playing the room, drawing her audience to her and her randy dog, her sport-obsessed husband, her selfish lover and her mismatched ‘participants’. For anybody who remembered Muggleton as Shirley Valentine, her impression of Athena, the Greek woman and her OMG expressions, was hilarious.

It’s small wonder the play is almost booked out every night. It’s well worth going to see such a quality performance but it would help stay in tune with the jokes if you’d read Fifty Shades of Grey and The Rosie Project, even just the most thumbed bits.