This was a really good night at the theatre. Debra Oswald proves to be a good storyteller, not only with her scriptwriting and her novels, but also performing solo in front of a live audience.
There didn’t appear to be any nerves and with Lee Lewis’ direction, the action flowed welly.
The staging was simple with a small platform stage. Behind Debra there were plenty of acrhive boxes. Above the stage was a large screen on which images were displayed.
There were some main threads to the night. The overarching theme was her journey as a writer.
Her love of theatre from a very young age. It has proved to be very provident, as she has written over ten plays including ‘Dags’, ‘Gary’s House’, ‘Mr Bailey’s Minder’ and ‘The Peach Season’.
Debra spoke about how, over the years, she has received plenty of knock-backs from theatre companies, as well as the successes, but she still loves writing for the theatre. She described how there’s nothing like the live theatre experience where you can feel the audience reacting. She recounted how at one performance a schoolboy yelled out for one of the characters not to kiss another character because he felt sorry for one of the other characters.
In one striking scene she gets out, from the archive boxes, different manuscripts that she has completed, in different mediums, that still haven’t been green-lighted and describes how writing is such a waiting game. Just sometimes, when the time is right, a script is picked up by a producer and gets made.
Her very popular tv show Offspring wasn’t picked up at first and then achieved a cult following. She joked about how during the reads of her script the dialogue got quite racy and she was a bit embarrassed to be in the same room. There was even a bit of the dialogue, read by one of the actors from the show, played over the theatre speakers.
She spoke about how her contributions to ‘Bananas and Pyjamas’ were influenced by talks she had at the time with two sons.
This was a show filled with anecdotes. There were pictures of her as a young girl. Stories about her Mum and Dad; her mum tended to be more critical and her Dad more supportive of her writing career.
Debra, with a very light touch, told us stories from her romantic life leading up to her long and happy marriage to media personality, Richard Glover. Some lovely photos from the time. Then there were more stories about their two families.
Lee Lewis’ main creative team comprised Set and Costume design Jeremy Allen , Lighting Design Matt Cox, Sound Designer Jessica Dunn and Video Realiser Daniel Hertin.
This show was a delight from beginning to end.
Highly recommended, Debra Oswald’s IS THERE SOMETHING WRONG WITH THAT LADY?, directed by Lee Lewis, is playing the Ensemble Theatre,
Production photography Prudence Upton