Broadway World Review
A Love Affair, from Galleon Theatre, written by Jerry Mayer and directed by the highly experienced Lesley Reid, is a cleverly written and charmingly sentimental evening in the intimate surroundings of the Domain Theatre.
I knew nothing about the play before I walked into the theatre, which is an unusual situation, and so I was able to let the story unfold. An older couple, Jimmy and Alice Diamond, are upstage in the attic of the home they are leaving. They are downsizing, as many older couples do. The reason will become clear. As they reminisce about the first years of their marriage, their memories are made flesh. Downstage, a bedroom where a young couple starts out on married life, with a lot of sex and aspirations.
The older couple finds things that provoke memories and we see the young couple take up the tale.
Then there's the moment when the play takes on a special dimension. The two couples meet. The man's forty-fifth birthday is the perfect time for the changing of the guard. As the older says to the younger, "This is the face you'll be seeing in the mirror from now on".
The senior Jimmy and Alice are Lindsay Dunn and Lindy Le Cornu, two well-loved stalwarts of Adelaide's non-commercial theatre world. The roles are in the safest of hands. Nick Endenburg and Shanna Ransley are the young incarnation, nicely balanced. Leanne Robinson is every other woman in the story. That the agile young student furniture mover is also the voluptuous and predatory comedy star, Glo Frazer, is a testament to her skill with quick characterisations, and the importance of wigs and costumes. On the subject of costumes, at one point Shanna Ransley appears in a trouser suit of such blinding luminosity my eyes took several moments to recover.
The play and the production sit so neatly in the Domain Theatre, with a highly appreciative local audience enjoying it and themselves greatly. You can guess the average age by the response to the jokes about menopause and prostate problems. They got lots of laughs.
Am I going to their next play, Hope and Gravity, in May 2023. Oh yes. I won the tickets in the interval raffle.
How to get there, for non-drivers. I took the Seaford train to Oaklands Park, headed south, and kept an eye out to my left. Just past, and a little behind the medical and dental services, and Centrelink, is the library, which is home to the Domain Theatre, and a pancake parlour that doubles as the theatre bar.
Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Thursday 20th October 2022.
GLAM Adelaide Review
Jimmy and Alice have been married for all of their adult lives. Now in their 60s, and having to move out of the family home, they are clearing out the attic junk and reminiscing about their shared lives. Younger versions of both of them appear on stage to act out seminal moments in the marriage, and these memories eventually segue into a form of dialogue with the older couple.
Jerry Mayer has a decades-long background in writing and producing American sit-coms of a certain era. When he moved into playwriting, he brought that particular rhythm and structure to the stage. A Love Affair is a perfect example of that, the two acts together seeming more like a distilled version of a 12 part comedy series. The humour itself is very "made for television" with a consistent string of one-liners. Refreshingly for this type of comedy, there is some reasonably sophisticated sexual humour. Not exactly edgy (pardon the pun!) but certainly more satisfying to adults than the average episode of Bewitched.
For Galleon, director Lesley Reed has pulled together a solid cast. Experienced performers Lindy LeCornu and Lindsay Dunn anchor the work beautifully as Alice and Jimmy. Nick Endenburg and Shanna Ransley are delightful as the younger versions. And Leanne Robinson puts in a decent night's work playing seven different roles! Reed is an intelligent and respectful director who certainly knows how to craft a stage performance. I would love to see her get away from the jack-in-the-box blocking - i.e. actors constantly going from sitting to standing in mid-dialogue - and trust her actors to just sit and talk to each other (and to trust the audience to not need the constant visual stimulation!).
Doing a play in accents is always a bit of a gamble, but generally the region-specific American accents were done well, although they still felt a little forced and sometimes actually detracted from the natural rhythm of the dialogue. The comic timing from all five performers was slightly sluggish on opening night, but the jokes still cracked where they needed to. And most importantly, the actors all worked beautifully off each other, and are clearly having fun up there.
A Love Affair is a genuinely funny, warm, and gently wise look at marriage. Galleon has done a splendid job of bringing this piece of theatre to life, pulling together a value-for-money night out. Kudos to Reed and the cast.
And you'll never look at postage stamps the same way again ...!
Reviewed by Tracey Korsten
Stage Whispers Review
An older married couple are cleaning out their attic in the early 1990s, reminiscing about their younger selves through the objects they find lying in boxes. They're moving because he's out of a job and their invested nest egg has been embezzled by their trusted financiers. He was a comedy writer, then producer; she is the organiser and the woman who has looked after the money he has earned.
The play explores the past decisions of the couple by presenting two versions of them: the older couple, knowing almost everything about each other, including how to argue (and when not to); and the younger version of themselves, learning about adult life through the experiences and mistakes they make since marrying in the 1950s.
The older version of Jimmy and Alice are played comfortably by two of Adelaide's community theatre stalwarts: Lindsay Dunn and Lindy LeCornu are familiar to most who have been rewarded by a night in a theatre that's not part of the Festival Centre. They mesh well here, making us laugh and empathise with their frustrations at growing old, losing their power both in the workplace and the bedroom. They bring the sitcom humour to the stage and have a convincing chemistry.
The younger couple are played by Nick Endenburg and Shanna Ransley, impressive actors in their own right, though with less connection on the stage than Dunn and LeCornu. This isn't a bad thing at the start, where their uncertainties of early marriage are realistically explored through establishing their roles and identities. Jimmy's impulse buying and constant demand for sex is countered by her precision and frugality - and both Endenburg and Ransley are natural in showing how they compromise.
All of the other characters in the play - a comedy host, an up-and-coming writer, and a removalist are amongst them - are played by Leanne Robinson, who brings loud laughter in her distinctions between the six.
Indeed, once the first act has warmed us up to how this story will be told, the second permits the jokes and innuendo to hit home much more easily. The writer, Jerry Mayer, has written extensively for US television shows such as M*A*S*H, All in the Family, and Bewitched - and that pedigree (and autobiography) shows through the scenes here, which wouldn't be out of place on the small screen. Particularly in the second act, their episodic nature even leaves gaps for commercials whilst the actors reset for the next scene.
Director Lesley Reed has assembled a fine cast and guides them well across the single set that serves as several locations throughout the play. It's cleverly designed by Kym Clayton and Reed so that it's lighting and the performers on stage that tell us where and when we are. James Allenby's lights help to guide us around the stage and across time without it being clumsy. The first breakout moment for the fifth performer bathes her in a stark white spotlight against the greys of the set: aside from her skin colour, it's a wonderful monochrome punch that stands apart from the usual wash of light across the stage.
Galleon Theatre Group know their audience, and A Love Affair is a gentle, adult comedy that makes us laugh and reminisce at our own journeys through love, work, and life.
Reviewed by Mark Wickett
Theatre Association of SA (TASA) Review
A Love Affair is a semi-autobiographical account of a 38-year
marriage written by Jerry Mayer, whose bread and butter was made in 1970s episodic
sit-com television series like The Facts of Life (1979), Tabitha (1976) and All
in the Family (1971). As you might expect, given this background, the play is
written for laughs, and is told episodically as the matured husband/wife duo
Jimmy and Alice Diamond relive significant moments of their shared history in
the house they now need to sell to an enterprising member of the new generation
of LA writers, thanks to a recent financial downturn.
Love and finances are often at odds in many relationships, responsible
for tension, tantrums, and tear-ups, and this play explores that dichotomised
disharmony in scenes between a frugal wife and a prodigal husband, who are scantly
drawn in the same way as many sit-com characters, yet so well-portrayed by the
actors that a disjointed story is compellingly conveyed such that we really
care for the people whose lives we get the chance to glimpse.
The caricatures: Jimmy the consummately concupiscent breadwinner,
and Alice the prudent family and finance planner, become characters whom we can
recognise and with whom we can empathise, despite their unrelenting set-up,
punchline modus operandi, thanks to heartfelt acting and the praiseworthy directorial
decision from Lesley Reed to play to their humanity, and not just ham it up for
the laughs. There are laughs, too, a good many of them, but they land so well
because the actors animate real people who we care about, as opposed to just
giving us what is written on the page.
The device of the play involves two generations of Diamonds,
but, they're the same Diamonds, just one couple are the 'older' Jimmy/Alice and
the other the 'younger.' The older Diamonds watch their younger counterparts,
commenting and advising them through their fights and finances, until the
second act, where the tables are turned, and the younger couple become the scrutinising
audience for their future selves.
Elder Jimmy is played by Lindsay Dunn, whose sensitivity
shines and mesmerises, and whose singing voice may elicit a tear in the midst
of a laugh-a-minute situational comedy of a play.
Jimmy Junior (I guess we can call him?) is played by Nick
Endenburg, who has a natural vulnerability and understated charm that endear
him to us quickly, allowing his OTT libido to come across as waggish rather
than problematic.
Lindy LeCornu plays the elder Alice with both the puissance
and delicacy needed to make her character more than a wet blanket. So effective
was her characterisation that she was responsible for moments to profound
poignancy, particularly in the latter part of the play, despite the limited
nature of the character as written.
Alice the younger was played by Shanna Ransley, with
outstanding charisma. Ransley imbues Alice Jr. with vibrance, energy, and
chutzpah, so that she truly enlivens and enriches the show whenever on stage.
Her singing voice is angelic, and moving, and she deftly managed to jerk a tear
as well as a laugh from the good-sized audience on opening night.
Leanne Robinson played more than a handful of female
characters with significant impact upon Jimmy and Alice at various times
throughout their 38-year marriage. Key to her successful performance(s) was the
strong differentiation between each of the characters she played, largely due
to some acute accent work.
Especially effective in this Galleon production was the lighting
design from James Allenby. There are many scene changes and transitions between
locations in the play made seamless largely by the clever and intuitive use of lighting.
The costumier also had to be on their toes to deal with all
the changes, and in this case, exceeded expectations, with characters being period
appropriate and often prepossessingly accoutred.
The set design was naturally simple, representing the
interior of a single LA house over a near four-decade span. The walls were
bare, and non-descript, so as to leave room for adornment in the change to the
second act, better reflecting of the change of times. An effective device for
avoiding anachronism as the story leapt from decade to decade. I was worried
that the older Jimmy/Alice may have become stuck in the back corner where they began
the story, clearing the attic, but, fortunately, they soon move into the
bedroom alongside their younger selves and in a better position to engage us in
the audience.
A Love Affair is written like a sit-com but produced by
Galleon, directed by Lesley Reed, and performed by the actors so well that it
speaks to us in the audience and earns the name 'play.'
Reviewed by Thomas Filsell
The Weekend Notes Review
An older married couple are cleaning out their attic in the early 1990s, reminiscing about their younger selves through the objects they find lying in boxes. They're moving because he's out of a job and their invested nest egg has been embezzled by their trusted financiers. He was a comedy writer, then producer; she is the organiser and the woman who has looked after the money he has earned.
The play explores the past decisions of the couple by presenting two versions of them: the older couple, knowing almost everything about each other, including how to argue (and when not to); and the younger version of themselves, learning about adult life through the experiences and mistakes they make since marrying in the 1950s.
See the full review
Reviewed by Jon Cocks
