Comments on: At Any Cost? | Ensemble Theatre

By: Susan Lever

Susan Lever — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 01:21:45 +0000

Yes, I agree. Your comments go to the source of the play’s mediocrity. It’s an enjoyable enough entertainment–but nearly everyone has a story that makes the conflict sharper (the patient who woke up the night that his partner decided to turn off the machines the next day etc). And the family were DW’s usual suspects. Even Middlemarch was cited to no dramatic purpose I could see.

By: Augusta Supple

Augusta Supple — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:09:47 +0000

Thanks for your perspective, always nice to hear the backstory to a play’s development…
of course the talent of the cast is not in question, nor the courage of the Ensemble to produce new Australian work…
but I do think that audiences evolve with the playwright – the more audiences see a playwright’s work – the more the writer must step up, and in this case, I think the audience may demand a little more character complexity than what is being offered in this draft.
Cliches are fine – and necessary for subversion – but there was no subversion in this instance. And therefore predictable trajectories follow, leaving me easilly disengaged.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 23:50:39 +0000

Your points about dramaturgy and this play are apt. I’ve heard that the cast and director and playwright did dramaturgy and collaborated vigorously throughout rehearsal. Play was then presented at Noosa Festival as an out-of-town try out, then company had a couple of weeks off before the Ensemble opening. Team was surprised that no major re-working or re-writing happened during that period in between. Changes, but not huge ones. Obviously the playwright(s) felt it was ready? I loved the cast, what the play was about, the courage of the Ensemble to put this on, the two-handed scenes, but I had some problems with the characters. The ‘rich bitch’, the ‘failed artist’, the ‘racist old bloke’, etc. The structure didn’t worry me, in fact I thought it was fine. The creaky stereotypes irked me.