A Night of Drama is a bumper banana bonanza. It’s improvised for your entertainment, and nearly perfect. Is there still a little peel to ditch for a truly dazzling performance?
We’re here to see A Night of Drama, an improvised yet directed play, complete with bananas for pelting the performers. The set-up is clear and the audience excited. There’s not quite the amount of people watching that this ensemble deserves, Lachlan Werner performed to a packed room at the same venue just a couple of hours earlier. But that makes for an intimate environment, the audience among a privileged few to see this show, for one night only.
The cast is made up of Jack Grossman as the Director, with his wayward team of supposedly exasperating actors, Luke Rollason, Rosalie Minnitt, Lachlan Werner, Benjamin Alborough, Levi Meltzer and Zoe Wohlfeld on-hand. With clowning and character comedy legends on the team, the show is as funny as you may expect. First, the auditions for the proposed production. A continued squawk of ‘Mother’ parades around the WundaBarn, as Rollason goes into repeated battle with Wohlfeld (said Mother) over a furry hat. There aren’t adequate words to convey how funny this is. And to top it off, the audience get to pelt them with banana peels!
The pitfall to the pelting is that anyone other than those at the front cabaret tables are really too far away to reach the stage with their peels, despite many admirable attempts. Could the house lights come up occasionally and the performers make their way into the crowd for a close-up chance? After a while, it also becomes obvious that the auditions for the play are going to take up most of the time, and it feels like the audience aren’t introduced to this game early enough. Grossman could ramp up the exasperation of the Director, and increase the tension, a little more for maximum effect here.
These aren’t huge things though. The audience is having a great time, and it’s easy to see why. With Lachlan Werner emitting clowning charm as a rip-off Billy Elliott, a miner boy who just wants to dance, and ludicrous representations of what a loving relationship looks like during the auditions stage, there’s laughs aplenty.
This improvised pseudo-play is perfectly ripe and ready to entertain. A great concept from a creative cast.
Reviewed on 23 May 2025.
