Reserved Seating Only; and Misdirected, July 27, 2000

Best and Fairest (2 plays):

Reserved Seating Only by Peter B Sonenstein, adapted by David Paterson;

Misdirected by Joe Borini;

By Boxing Day Productions

Where and When: Trades Hall July 20 - August 19, 2000

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Whether you are married to Aussie Rules or you are a football widow who loathes the grip the game has on your spouse, you will enjoy Best and Fairest.

There are two short plays in the program. The first and perhaps the stronger of the pair, is Reserved Seating Only by American playwright, Peter B. Sonenstein directed by Richard Sarell. David Paterson, co-founder of Boxing Day Productions, adapted the play expertly to the Australian context.

He plays Al, a fanatical Essendon support who attends the first game of the season only to find his usual neighbour in the members reserved seating replaced by his missing mate's anti-football wife, Trina (Cecelia Specht). She divorced her husband and took his most treasured possession: his reserved seat ticket. Al is appalled.

Paterson's localisation of the script is intelligent, topical and hilarious. References to Ducklands Stadium's falling metal, crummy turf and bad ticketing are plentiful. He integrates bucket loads of crowd-pleasing epithets, abuse and colloquialisms. "White maggot" is only one.

The beauty of the piece is in the burgeoning relationship between these two undeclared lonely people who find they quite like each other's company.

Al teaches Trina the finer points of the game: commitment, teamwork, sacrifice, elegance. She shows him its incongruities. There is pathos in Trina's need to understand why her husband loved the game more than he loved her.

Both performances are focussed and funny as they are in the second play, Misdirected, written by another American, Joe Borini, and directed by John Higginson. This play does not translate to Australia as successfully as the first.

It is a smart and funny piece about a mail-order bride late in the 19th century, arriving in the remote Victorian Highlands from California to marry an Australian landowner. She arrives at the wrong house in the wrong town with the wrong man.

The humour resides in the miscommunication and mishaps in Misdirected. She is Miss Prim with "the warmth of a lizard and the tact of a hyena" . He is rough and misanthropic. They end up in love of course but it feels a bit like a comic version of Little House on the Prairie.

By Kate Herbert