The Dining Room

The Dining Room / Woodley Theatre

FROM small children to grandparents, giggling teenagers to sedate couples, this play, performed by the talented students of The Rep College, introduced a succession of vignettes around the dining table of an upper middle class American household.
  The cast of fifteen, each of whom portrayed many roles, competently depicted the 57 characters in this fascinating, yet unusual play, making costume changes along the way to reflect the date of each scene.
  Older audiences will recall the days of repertory theatre when, week by week, small groups of actors played a widely differing range of roles. Those days are a thing of the past and as modern plays rarely afford usch opportunities, this light hearted piece was an excellent choice for the students, who were challenged to demonstrate their craft in an extensive range of circumstances. A challenge they readily encompassed.

Barrie Theobold

by A R Gurney, performed by Rep College, Woodley Theatre, October 27

THE format of the play is a time-lapse docu-soap. Its subject is the decline of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) mores during the 20th century. A 'vanishing cultue' that is the topic of one nephew's class anthropology project.
  Several generations of families form a rolling and overlapping montage of scenes showing their use of and behaviour in the dining room of a large New England House. The closing dinner party is one of old rituals that are bereft of meaning.
  The actors step in and out of roles more frequently and quicker than dishes at a Chinese banquet. They acheive the flavour of character with keeness and observation, making the most of the infrequent opportunities for energy. There are tasters of rumbustious kids, laconic maids, authoritarian fathers, stoic wives, frisky widows, rebellious adolscents, with passing references to senility, fidelity and homosexuality.
  The Rep College uphold the feel of lost values that is in the purport of the play, leaving a tang from the episodes that women are the revolutionaries, men the reactionaries.

WOC