CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR NEW CAST 

 

Friday 14th June, 2013 

 

We would like to formally thank everyone who auditioned.

 

We had an overwhelming response which meant we were spoiled for choice. 

 

However, we would like to congratulate and welcome our new cast members! Joining our team: 

 

Brendan Paul as Cpt Collins

 

Ryan Knight as Elliot Cohen

 

And 

 

Nicholas Richard as Thomas Parsons.

 

We are very excited to get going - keep an eye out for more updates of our rehearsals and progress!

 



AUSTRALIAN STAGE REVIEW



Reviewed by Rebecca Whitton for Australian Stage, 19th March, 2013



The First World War marked the turning point in how war is perceived. With the unprecedented loss of lives reported daily on the front pages of the British press, old notions of honour fighting for one’s country were challenged. War poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen wrote of the horrors in the trenches and afterwards, T.S. Eliot wrote of the moral bankruptcy that comes from the experience of war. Set in 1916 in the trenches of the Western Front, Nathan Finger’s play takes up these ideas from WW1 and applies them to war more broadly.



In the opening scene, Officers Parsons (Lachlan McNab),Cohen (Carl Quitzau) and Clarke (Manny Kanellis) are back from a hard day on the job dealing, again, with the monstrous grind of war. Parsons is suffering from Trench Foot and hopes that if it turns gangrenous, he might be sent home. Despite the terrible food, obscene loss of life and callous commanding officers, the other two are less defeated by their experiences and are trying to make the best of things.

When Sydney Abba arrives on stage as the very British Col. McGrath to blithely send yet another Australian officer to his death, she lifts the energy level and introduces a new tone to the play that almost steals the show. What, up until the Colonel’s entrance, had been a realist piece, becomes more textured. Abba is a wonderful performer and she makes the most of her blackly comic, inept and callous character.

Writer/director Finger has a lovely sense of humour and a flair for comic characterisation. It is most obvious in this character but elsewhere too, in the rhythms of his comic banter. At times the play has an absurdist tone, reminiscent of Fernando Arrabal’s 1961 play Picnic on a Battlefield. At other times it shifts closer to realism and seriously tries to establish the value of war.....



Read the Full Review Here: 

 

http://www.australianstage.com.au/201303196211/reviews/sydney/narrow-as-the-line.html