Theatre

Playlab Press is an offshoot of the Queensland Playwrights Laboratory which has the aim of assisting playwrights in the development of their craft through workshopping, production and possible publication of playscripts. It seems to be, with one exception, very much a regional enterprise and all the more admirable for it. The quality and number of these scripts culled, one assumes, from a much larger number of scripts submitted for selection, suggests a wealth of unpublished and unperformed theatrical material in the rest of Australia waiting for local groups as enterprising as the Queensland Playrights Laboratory.

Is there life after fifty? David Williamson’s newest play wittily affirms that love, adventure, and increasing self-knowledge are not the exclusive preserves of the young. Frank, seventy-five, retired engineer and ex-communist, is no spring chicken but neither is he ‘defunct in the physical area’.