Talk to The Hand a Success

    At a small theatre, near the train station at Coniston, there was theatrical magic. It was Short and Sweet Illawarra Week 2. It ran from Thursday 2nd to Saturday the 4th of December. All these plays were expected to be shown earlier in the year but, thanks to the pandemic, that was not possible.

    Talk to The Hand was among the plays and, thanks to director Gabriela Gonzales and actors Matt Bonnici and Michelle Phillips, it got a lot of laughs. As a writer, I couldn't have asked for a better crew to bring my vision of hands that do talk to life. 

     One of the other plays that was staged I took a liking to was Clean Swap, a comedy about a street robbery that goes wrong. In it both Molly Turton and Johnny Chamberlain give great performances. 

      Another was Press Pray, about a woman seeking guidance in a church and encountering a call centre that drives her crazy. It stared Jasmin Shojai as the distressed woman and Toryn Biester as the prayer centre voice.  

     Socialite Networking I didn't take to Thursday night, but thought it ran really well on the Saturday. Set in the 1930s, it is about the rich and the want to be famous. It is a selfish world in which only fame matters. It starred Georgina Reed, Isabella Franklin and Tom Hadley.

      My sister, who saw Thursday night's performances with me, concluded that Spell it Out, starring Sally Evans, Ihaka Jones, Barbara Weir and Gabriela Gonzalez, was definitely worth a mention. The build up was slow but once it got going it was indeed great. It was about a woman who has the compulsion to spell everything out, a strange psychiatrist, a friendly nut job and a waitress  unhappy with her work.

       My only regret with the staging of Talk to The Hand is that it only ran for three nights. It would have been wonderful if it had gone on for two weeks. Even so, with three nights of very few empty seats, and an audience finding humour in Talk to The Hand, I did alright.