The Other End of the Afternoon – REVIEW

Bokkie Robertson’s play, The Other End of The Afternoon, is being mounted at the New Theatre as part of this year’s Sydney Fringe Festival. The play puts teenage angst front and centre of the “dramedy”, and won Robertson a Silver Gull Award, which was established in 2015 as a prize for new theatrical writing more than 60 minutes long.

In addition to coping with their schoolwork, the teenage characters are faced variously with bullying and physical abuse, and stresses from all sides.

The central character Clive (played by Sam Wallace) claims that if you concentrate hard enough, you can time- travel backwards to an afternoon when life seems good. He is keen to get to such a place. Meanwhile he wears a top hat to school in case he can time travel backwards to an earlier top hat-wearing era.

Dylan Brady (Dominique  Purdue) definitely wants to escape to another place after the police start chasing her for punching a teacher in the face.

Clive’s step brother Xavier (Sam Martin) taunts their straight-laced middle-class father at the dinner table by claiming he wishes to be a panel beater.

Much to her disgust, Bianca Zhu (Sophie Teo) is forced to share a desk with Clive at school, but he redeems himself in her eyes by telling her he can time travel.

The remaining cast members play a variety of characters.

There are few scenes which are long enough to allow the characters to develop more fully, and there is unfortunately a lot of shouting which robs the script of any subtlety it might have had.

Take your 13 year olds to see this play and they will enjoy it.

Take your granny and she will hate it.

The work raises some serious issues but they are mostly left hanging, with no place to go.

Until 1 October

New Theatre, 542 King St, Newtown

newtheatre.org.au/the-other-end-of-the-afternoon/