Things that go bump and fall flat in the night
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday December 4, 2009
SYDNEY GHOST STORIESOld Fitzroy, December 1Until December 19THIS exercise in "around the campfire" storytelling starts reasonably well as the Old Fitzroy's traditional welcome and housekeeping speech (delivered by Jamie McGregor) slips into a prologue that paints the venerable Woolloomooloo pub venue as a hotbed of paranormal activity.He tells us of hearing footsteps and moaning, of being brushed against while fumbling for the light switch or mischievously tapped on the shoulder. Actor Daniel Rigney, who died in 1997 and after whom the pub's top bar is named, apparently still makes his presence felt.It sets the mood nicely but everything that follows - six short plays - fails to capitalise on it.Toby Schmitz's The Point of the Story (performed by Jeneffa Soldatic and Matthew Walker, directed by Dean Carey) and Lachlan Philpott's Ibis (featuring Joe Manning and Catherine Terracini, directed by Anthony Skuse) in which young first-home buyers are spooked, are short, sketchy affairs. Neither is very involving. Verity Laughton's Ghostie, in which a man lures a lover into a derelict house, is unconvincing in every respect.Things pick up after interval but from a very low base. Tobsha Learner's Black Wedding has its wry moments as members of a Goth band staging a wedding at Sydney's Mortuary Station come face-to-face with an uninvited guest who claims that frontman Edward is her intended. "Demented groupie scenario number 666," quips embittered bass player Seth(Jamie Irvine).Rebecca Clarke's Escape Pod, in which a young mother is haunted, is the best of the playlets on offer - at least there's some depth and drama there. Not so Stephen Sewell's Act 2, which has the whiff of the bottom drawer about it.Sydney Ghost Stories is an eminently marketable idea but the plays packaged together here are too short to build interest or generate tension, and are poorly framed and presented.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
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