A Month Of Sundays
by Bob Larbey
State Theatre Company
Playhouse

After two very successful stints in Sydney, the Northside Theatre production of A Month of Sundays is now opening the card for the State Theatre Company’s 1989 season. It is an astute choice because the play is so reassuringly conventional that it will please a wide audience but it still has substance enough for those who don’t need everything on the stage to have whiskers and a tail.

Playwright Bob Larbey has had a long career in radio and TV scripting. With his partner John Esmonde he was responsible for such troglodyte series as Please Sir and The Fenn Street Gang but then, with The Good Life, he began to find a sub-Ayckbourn edge which he developed further in the Judi Dench/ Michael Williams vehicle A Fine Romance, a series he wrote on his own.

A Month of Sundays is about coming to grips with old age before it comes to grips with you. Cooper, a widower with an only daughter living in Clare – the play has been grafted in Adelaide and it sort of works – has moved into a retirement village at Glenelg. He has one friend, Aylott, with whom he plays chess and reminisces about cricket. He has leg problems and he doesn’t like to leave his room. Apart from the dutiful monthly Sunday visit from his daughter, his social life consists of bantering with the nurse and the cleaning woman.

Director Aubrey Mellor has kept this production adroitly under control. The pacing and interaction favours a delicacy of touch, a sensitivity no less, which keeps the comedy and the intimations of mortality in judicious balance. A Month of Sundays may be conventional theatre but it is certainly not the kind you see very often.

Fax Pas (Letter to Editor, Adelaide Review)

Dear Sir,
While brevity is the soul of wit, I did not intend my review of the State Theatre Company’s Month of Sundays (Age Old Questions, March AR) to be quite that witty.

It would seem that there are times when even FAX fux up and this was one of them. A page of copy went missing in transmission and with it honourable mention of performances by actors Ron Haddrick, Brian James, Diane Smith and Carol Skinner in particular, as well as contributions by designer Peter Cooke and lighting designer Tony Youlden.

Could you please record my regret that the review was incomplete.

Murray Bramwell,