Image via www.darlinghursttheatre.com
With support from his family, Darlinghurst Theatre Company is staging a series of plays by the late and much admired playwright and teacher Nick Enright. The Eternity Playhouse already honours him by giving his name to the bar, and now showing upstairs is Enright’s 1989 farce Daylight Saving.
It’s a soufflé comedy about a successful chef and her husband Tom who constantly travels managing the world’s most successful, and brattish, tennis player. Tonight, with Tom away for their wedding anniversary, Felicity is hosting a lobster dinner for an old teenage heartthrob who just arrived from America. And then everyone turns up.
Helen Dallimore is the star act as the myopically self-obsessed neighbour; Belinda Giblin sweeps in possessively as the North Shore widow (Felicity’s Mum); and Jacob Warner appeals as the demanding tennis prodigy.
The real showdown though is when Tom (the appropriately cool and ever-reasonable Christopher Stollery) returns early and meets his replacement for the night, Ian Stenlake as the arduously persistent Joshua Makepeace.
Peace and love work out in the end, as it must in comfortably unchallenging theatre like this. Rachel Gordon manages the changing fortune’s of Felicity’s night with realistic aplomb, but the comedy is slow to start and the laughs at first surprisingly few. Adam Cook’s cast seem over eager racing to expected comic moments. A more natural playfulness would have allowed for the play’s poignancy about loneliness in marriage and our desperate nostalgia to remake the past to explored.
The Eternity is an attractively intimate theatre and Hugh O’Connor’s wide North Shore apartment fills it luxuriously. Set on what is the last night of daylight saving, Gavan Swift’s lightning captures richly the falling sunset – and promise – of summer’s last day.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Daylight Saving
Darlinghurst Theatre Company
Written by Nick Enright
31 October – 30 November 2014
