Review: A LOVE AFFAIR at Domain Theatre, Marion Cultural Centre

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Thursday 20th October 2022.

A Love Affair, from Galleon Theatre, 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.

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