After Dinner
by Andrew Bovell
State Theatre Company
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre.
April 10. Tickets: $34- $76. Bookings 131 246 or online.
Duration 2 hours (including interval)
Until April 29.

Murray Bramwell

It is thirty years almost to the day since Andrew Bovell’s After Dinner opened at La Mama in Melbourne and while it is a slice of the late 1980s, the revival by Sydney Theatre Company in 2015, and now this watchable and well-judged production by State Theatre …

Vale
by Nicki Bloom
State Theatre Company
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
November 21. Tickets: $33- $61. Bookings 131 246 or online.
Duration 2 hours (including interval)
Until December 3.

“We’re weeds,” declares hotel tycoon Joseph Vale, “people rip us out roots and all /But back we come/tough as before.” Vale, Nicki Bloom’s new play for State Theatre Company, is a raucous, grimly funny portrait of star-crossed young lovers, their dysfunctional families, and the inevitable rise and fall of …

Switzerland
by Joanna Murray-Smith
State Theatre Company
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
October 25. Tickets: $33- $61. Bookings 131 246 or online.
Duration: 1 hour 40 minutes. No interval.
Until November 5.

“My imagination functions much better,” the American novelist Patricia Highsmith sardonically observed, “when I don’t have to speak to people.” She much preferred to be alone with words. Misanthropic, prejudiced, witheringly intolerant, Highsmith wrote fiction about crime which was much more than generic crime fiction.

Admired by Graham …