Review: Good Night - The End

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Photo: Matt Grace

Good Night - The End, Jo Randerson’s play at Downstage is an absurd, existential, gothic, latter day Gliding On.

It is set in a garish, nightmarish room with bizarre lino tiles on the walls and floor. They are a grid of pink and blue flowers and skulls. The furniture is a junk mixture, the magazines are raggy, the fridge is too small, the dishwasher is too flash, the crockery is too dirty, and the lid is never on the Milo.

The tea room in an office can be like that. The staff room in a school can be like that, Colourful and eccentric but not cosy or even particularly comfortable. The staff room is the place where you bond with workmates, get to know their secrets and offer and get support. The denizens of the Downstage den are grim reapers dressed in their professional garb and with their scythes placed in a row against the wall. They are not a disciplined team. They are mean with the food, silly with the milk and mucky with the cups.

What’s worse is, the boss doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t speak their language and he doesn’t understand the stresses of their job. He didn’t come up through the reaper ranks, he steals the limelight, sexually harasses, and makes a statutory restructuring speech. As the boss from hell pursued by baying dogs Aaron Cortesi’s L’amministrazione is a delightful show-off.

What the reapers need is a good union. The Transitional Friend played by Thomas La Hood and painted by Goya tries to demonstrate the advantages of being in a union with his little handful of sticks and damn it, it doesn’t work. United the sticks fail to stand. But, in his mournful way he has the right idea.

The school party in the audience loved the play. They loved the clever business. They loved the boss making his own arrangements with the codpiece in his very tight pants and they groaned at the yuckiness when he washed himself with the dishcloth and then used it to wipe his spoon and stir his Milo. Felicity McDonnell the obese Unavoidable Destiny with lovely slender hands to stuff the junkfood into her sweet rosebud mouth and Jo Randerson herself, Harvester of Sorrow with wild hair, fierce eye makeup and built up boots were, with Transitional Friend, a recognisable staff room trio. They did the professional association of grim reapers proud.

The production broods and threatens, it is new and original, it has memorable moments and it isn’t predictable. But what on earth, or what for heavens sake, or what the hell was it really all about?

ENDS

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