Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St Kilda

until July 11, 2009

As with Kenneth Lonergan’s earlier success, This Is Our Youth, his Lobby Hero is another affectionate comedy about a nerd guy who, despite the odds, overcomes his nerdiness, scores a moral triumph and even impresses a girl.

It’s set in a Manhattan apartment building lobby. In the building lives Mrs Heinvald, a woman of generous affection who’s beloved of local cop Bill (Daniel Frederiksen). Bill visits her each night whilst on his beat.

The apartment security guard, Jeff (Tim Potter), is the nerd hero, a would-be conversationalist who only stops talking long enough to put his foot in his mouth and who manages to put Bill’s rookie assistant Dawn (Eryn-Jean Norvill) offside during one of Bill’s nocturnal calls. Jeff also blabbers his way into the confidence of his boss, William (Christopher Kirby), and uncovers some potentially embarrassing secrets.

Dropping his voice half an octave and appearing ten years older, Frederiksen is amazing as the gruff, old cop hiding his duplicity behind his badge. Potter flinches like a scalded puppy each time his attempts at camaraderie backfire and suffers agonies of self-consciousness. The faint glimmer of romance between Jeff and Dawn brings a feeling of relief.

Not strictly laugh-out-loud comedy, the play derives its humour from exposing people’s hidden motives. Denis Moore’s production mixes instead table-turning farce with more serious comedy.

Photo: Daniel Frederiksen (right) and Tim Potter in Lobby Hero.

The Man from Mukinupin

Sumner Theatre, Southbank

until July 19, 2009

Dorothy Hewett’s 1979 musical play The Man from Mukinupin was an unlikely way of celebrating Western Australia’s 150th birthday.

Set around the time of the First World War, it shows the ugly side of the Anzac legacy with local war hero Harry Tuesday (Craig Annis) becoming a shell-shocked public disgrace.

Even more controversial is Hewett’s inclusion of the worst aspect of colonial behaviour toward Aborigines. Hewett evokes this mythical town by referencing Dylan Thomas’s own celebration of town life Under Milk Wood and like Thomas’s, her dialogue is richly poetic – so that even sudden outbursts of song seem logical.

Mukinupin has a nocturnal, subconscious counterpart and in that nether-world the characters have alter-egos played by the same actors.

The righteous Eek Perkins (Max Gillies) alternates with a crazy hermit dwelling in the bush. Eek’s pious wife Edie (Kerry Walker) wanders as her community’s guilty conscience. Hewett brilliantly adapts the sleepwalking scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, making Edie guiltily lament, instead, the slaughter of the local Aboriginal community by the townsfolk.

Director Wesley Enoch begins this almost surreal play in a highly artificial manner: all the characters wear clown-white make-up and act in front of a false curtain.

Within this artifice Indigenous actors Suzannah Bayes-Morton and David Page also play the white townsfolk, Bayes-Morton as Perkins’ daughter Polly and Page as her suitor Cecil Brunner (ironically, the name of a variety of pale pink rose!), emphasising the black-white relationships more successfully than in previous productions.

Jim Cotter’s songs have the subtle but savage bite of The Threepenny Opera and perfectly match Hewett’s subtle but equally savage satire.