Starry Comet Night
T.S. Elliot predicted the world would end with a whimper. Con Nats suggests a fiery comet will destroy earth. This show is one of the many on offer at the Sydney Fringe Festival.
Boiler Room, Factory Theatre, Marrickville, Sydney
Saturday 18th September, 2010.
T.S. Elliot predicted the world would end with a whimper. Con Nats suggests a fiery comet will destroy earth. This show is one of the many on offer at the Sydney Fringe Festival. The festival described as “bursting up from the underground in Sydney’s Inner West” runs from 10-26th September 2010.
Nats, who wrote and directed this one hour play introduces three disparate characters all sharing a house. Tim (Lynden Jones) is the smart mouthed gay man who has rather inexplicably set up a blind date for flatmate Stanley (Blackwood Hume). The lucky girl Natalie (Kym Parrish) meets another of the flatmates, Suzie, (Barbra Gouskos) who is a police stress counsellor and about as sensitive as an unpleasant enema which she threatens to all and sundry. The four of them are rather improbably going out to dinner, but when Stanley arrives home in a panic about a dead friend who ‘knew too much’ it is apparent the evening is going to take a different trajectory.
When a pizza man (Matthew Stewart) arrives and shoots Tim, it turns out Stanley has found out about a comet which will wipe out the world in five years time. The pizza man is a CIA agent and wants to keep civilisation in tact for as long as possible by not informing people of what is to come. There follows the ‘what would you do if you knew the world was going to end?’ discussion with various points of view debated. The housemates and blind date realise they are trapped with no way out. Several more people get shot, cars are blown up and eventually Natalie is the only one left. In a very strange final twist she is revealed as an Irish religious zealot, although the purpose of the ‘set up’ of these flatmates is never really made clear.
There is fast repartee early on, with some funny lines like this one about Suzie’s stress counselling:- “One session with Suzie and the tasers and they forget what they were stressed about” however some of the humour was lost with the frenetic pace of delivery. As the piece continued the improbabilities became greater and more difficult to assimilate. The ensemble buzzed with energy and the plot certainly did whizz along, but it was to the detriment of a clear story line.
