Three half hour plays from the Roulette series by Raimondo Cortese

• Night : a club, two women, double vodkas
• Petroleum : a wallaby, an accident, a slow Sunday
• Inconsolable : a man, a woman, a stalker

The short works on offer here are each as amusing, accomplished and provocative entertainments as you could wish to stumble upon. This is very exciting work, by turns naturalistic and surreal, unbearably tense and wildly comic, and always utterly contemporary. At times it's theatre so good you wonder how cinema ever took over in our estimations of performed reality, when only the stage can give a sensation of eavesdropping on extremely intimate human exchanges from a constant, silent point of view.

REVIEWS

ROULETTE x 3: Bakehouse Theatre Company Bakehouse Theatre, 255 Angas St, Adelaide To September 16

AUSTRALIAN playwright Raimondo Cortese is still writing his series of 12 half-hour plays, with only the first eight completed so far. Three of these make for an amusing, if not voyeuristic, night at the Bakehouse. The stand-alone stories are each a slice of life where two strangers meet and we witness their interaction, which is sometimes engaging, sometimes awkward, but always intriguing.The meandering, naturalistic conversations twist and turn but don't always lead somewhere new. Patrick Graham and Emily Hunt meet first in Inconsolable, set in a beachside cafe.

One is lonely, the other wants to escape, but the connection they develop forces them to stop game playing and make a decision. Joh Hartog's static direction works a treat, focusing on the words and games being played out. The talented actors easily hold focus, providing a beautiful balance of depth, desperation and manipulation. In Night, Jessica Beck and Julia Fry play two women who meet in a bar and progressively get drunker and more honest as the night wears on. While Fry's ham acting is a little too much, Beck's alcoholic stupor is superb, and the contrast of the two characters creates a nice comedic balance. The oddly named Petroleum is set in a mechanic shop where actor Peter Green is a desperate, angry businessman stranded after hitting a wallaby at high speed. He is faced with younger, wiser Tim Solly as Gordon, a laid-back country lad with a good head on his shoulders. This is by far the darkest of the three tales, but the dynamic relationship in the fire-and-water duet nonetheless offers a steady stream of chuckles as their opposing values cause ever-increasing friction. The three tales are surprisingly different in style, demonstrating Hartogs skill as a director by keeping each one so distinct. Cortese's dialogue sometimes leaves you wanting more, particularly in the last play where we are only ever offered a hint of Gordon's story, but if the aim is to show that the journey is sometimes more interesting than the destination, then he succeeds in abundance.

ROD LEWIS - Review published in The City Messenger, 6-9-06, p. 20.