Sydney Reviews

Sylvia’s getting married and she and her sisters, Hazel and Maggie, are getting their hair curled. In pops their Auntie Carol (Jo Briant) who proceeds to talk about the greying of her short and curlies.

Hazel’s kids, Leanne (Amy Goedecke) and Sarah (Kira McLennan) are all in a tizz about hair and zits and Sylvia is having a malfunction with her wedding dress. Carol commands a bucks fizz.

This is the opening scene of Secret House’s production of Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down and it’s awash with frantic business and zinger lines. Aphorism swarm the scene like aphids on a stem, similes similarly.

It seems all benign banter until after the ceremony has been officiated and we move onto the reception, where post nuptial napalm of past enmities, current infidelities, cultural bigotry, economic and emotional bankruptcy conflate into a hysterical ground zero.

Till the Stars Come Down takes its title from a line in W.H. Auden’s poem, Death’s Echo – dance till the stars come down – and there is a lot of dance in this show, free style stomping, the type often witnessed at drunken gatherings like weddings.

The three sisters share a thread of being bred by the same father but that strand is strained due to Hazel’s (Ainslie McGlynn) thinly veiled disapproval of both siblings. To her mind, Maggie (Jane Anharad) is a spread her legs for anybody slut and Sylvia (Imogen Sage) has shown poor choice in selecting a spouse who is Polish.

It doesn't help matters that Hazel’s husband, John (James Smithers) is having an affair with Maggie and that John is unemployed whereas Marek (Zoran Jevtic) is gainfully employed. To rub salt into the wound, Marek offers John a job, the temerity of the foreigner who is the cause for all of Britain’s woes.

Suspicion descends into slander with Marek accused of inter family paedophilia and John resorts to violence over the perceived grooming of his daughter, ironic and hypocritical in the face of his own grooming of his sister in law. She may not be a child but has a child like ignorance believing the sun becomes the moon at night.

There is some simmering conflict between the girl’s father, Tony (Peter Eyers) and his brother, Pete (Brendan Miles) about crossing a line 37 years ago, that never really comes to the boil, a brass rubbing doused by Hazel’s hysteria.