Sextet by Leonard Radic, July 31, 1996

At  Napier St Theatre until August 18, 1996

Reviewed by kate Herbert around July 31, 1996

The phenomenon of a critic writing a play is sufficiently unusual. What are the odds on a critic-playwright reviewing a play by another critic-playwright who recently reviewed the first critic's play. Here goes!

Leonard Radic's Sextet, which he vows is not autobiographical, draws on years of experience as The Age critic and observations of the theatre industry and its creatures. It is directed by Malcolm Robertson in a traverse stage which seats audience on two sides of the action.

A new play is being staged with a critic (William Gluth) in a leading role and his wife (Jane Badler), her lover (John Higginson) and the critic's potential lover (Penelope Hanby) also acting. It is wickedly entertaining to see Radic's composite characters based in real people we love to hate. 

Ralph Tomasetti (Damien Richardson) is a fine satirical portrait of every pompous, jumped-up young director who ever deigned to grace our stages with productions of classics with bastardised text, set in mud with hessian costumes. His tour de force was Macbeth set in the Mekong Delta.

Actors whimper and quibble, writer chucks tantrums about his adulterated text, director wants total control. It is an unbridled attack on the pretentious in theatre. It's probably still funny even if you do not work in the theatre.

Radic has tampered with narrative form, blurring boundaries between rehearsal and performance, writing and improvisation and, most significantly, between reality and fiction. The actors live out their tangled real life relationships as the writer (James Benedict) tapes them to use, verbatim, in scenes.

The director is dragged into the action, initially to narrate then, later, as a character in the play within a play. There are direct references to audience, the stage manager, stolen lines and mixed up names. There is something of Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound without all the deaths and much less complex.

All this works better in the first act where the dialogue is brisk and the humour acid. Richardson is breezy and charmingly smug as the arrogant director and Benedict is appropriately precious and earnest as the writer. 

There seems to be some miscasting elsewhere in the production and the second half, particularly, suffers from some rather mannered acting as well as some repetitive dialogue. Richardson's lesser presence after interval leaves the piece taking itself a little too seriously. But is all, nonetheless, a bit of a hoot.

KATE HERBERT