Tag Archives: canberra youth theatre

Review: Work, But This Time Like You Mean It (The Rebel Theatre)

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Venue: The Rebel Theatre (Sydney NSW), Oct 15 – 18 , 2025
Playwright: Honor Webster-Mannison
Director: Luke Rogers
Cast: Georgie Bianchini, Hannah Cornelia, Kathleen Dunkerley, Quinn Goodwin, Matthew Hogan, Blue Hyslop, Sterling Notley, Emma Piva
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Theatre review
Chaos is the natural order in a fast-food restaurant, where young workers hold down the counters and, by extension, the bottom tiers of vast corporate empires. Honor Webster-Mannison’s Work, But This Time Like You Mean It announces its irony from the title, a wry invitation to reflect on labour, performance, and disillusionment. The play mines humour from the everyday grind, though its observations rarely move beyond the familiar. Still, the writing’s energy and authenticity make it a fertile ground for theatrical invention.

Directed by Luke Rogers, the production delivers amusement in spades, impressing with its relentless energy and visual exuberance. Set within the bleak confines of a takeout joint, Rogers’ staging transforms the banal into the spectacular, revealing the latent drama of labour and exhaustion.

Kathleen Kershaw’s set is both playground and pressure cooker, facilitating agile movement while immersing us in vivid, layered visuals. Ethan Hamill’s lighting gives the work structure and momentum, while Patrick Haesler’s sound design further heightens atmosphere and tension, ensuring the production maintains a constant sense of urgency and rhythm. Together, these elements generate a rhythm that feels breathless yet purposeful, a choreography of survival rendered with theatrical bravado.

A cast of eight delivers the show’s discombobulating heart with infectious precision and energy. Their performances are tightly honed, radiating a cohesion and verve that keep the audience engaged from start to finish. As the beleaguered branch manager, Blue Hyslop stands out for both charm and nuance, balancing comic timing with moments of surprising emotional depth amid the surrounding mayhem.

Work, But This Time Like You Mean It presents entry-level work as both crucible and classroom, a space where identities are forged under pressure, and where the absurd machinery of labour dispenses its quiet lessons in endurance. It exposes the inevitability of our initiation into capitalism, especially at an age too young to grasp its traps, when the thrill of a first job disguises the real lesson: that the system always starts by teaching us how to stay in line.

www.canberrayouththeatre.com.au

Review: The Verbatim Project (Canberra Youth Theatre)

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Venue: ATYP (Walsh Bay NSW), Jul 19 – 22, 2017
Director: Katie Cawthorne
Cast: Jean Bennett, Jasper Kilby, Denise Druitt, Jack Hubner, Katie Hubner, Merilyn Jenkins, Carol Mackay, Charlotte Palmer, Sao Hom Palu, Yarno Rohling, Diana Sandeman, Kate Sherren, Elektra Spencer, Ted Stewart, David Turbayne, Quinten Van Rooy

Theatre review
The cast is comprised of ten young Canberrans, from 14 to 16 of age, and six seniors, 65 to 80 years old. The Verbatim Project is a conversation across generations, offering an opportunity to look at how we contrast, and how we are consistent, within this unusual juxtaposition of peoples.

In their show, we hear thoughts about things that matter to Australians today, political, social and personal, through a wide variety of theatrical devices that help keep things interesting. Sound and video recordings, accompany the live physicality of its performers, consciously presented in movement and installation; using a multi-faceted approach to speak, without the use of a conventional narrative.

Director Katie Cawthorne and lighting designer Brynn Somerville, have structured a show that reveals the best of its cast. It is not a professional troupe, but all their strong suits are sensitively emphasised, with no distractions permitted to shift us away from a tightly assembled production. The text can sometimes be refreshing, but is generally predictable, with nothing controversial ever finding itself in the mix. It is a middle class look at middle class Australia, polite and well-meaning, and very civilised indeed.

There is a rigidity in The Verbatim Project that prevents anything from going wrong, but because nothing is left to chance, we are rarely able to discern the genuine connections between the personalities we meet. They are all too busy following instructions to let us in, on something more impulsive or spontaneous. Behind smoke and mirrors, we never really discover if the chasm of half a century can be bridged. Age can be made irrelevant, or it can mean everything.

www.cytc.net