Review: GOOD GRIEF at ARTS Theatre

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Wednesday 8th November 2023.

Let me admit right from the start that I have known and loved Sue Wylie for a long time. I’ve admired and responded to her intelligence, insight, and stagecraft. In this production of Keith Waterhouse’s Good Grief, directed by Angela Short for Therry Theatre, she brings all that to a play that is almost a one-woman show, with three other fine performers alongside. She maintains a North Country accent. Waterhouse was from Yorkshire. Sam, the late husband of the central character, is Lancastrian. Wylie’s many changes of clothes are aided by the fact that she has two dressers waiting for her off-stage.

June Pepper has just buried Sam, her husband of many years. He was a highly successful Fleet Street editor. One of his last requests was that she keep a diary for a year, noting down all her thoughts. After all, he’s a journalist. She decides otherwise and keeps it all in her head, talking to him. We are listeners, overhearing.

Her stepdaughter Pauline, the stylish Monica Lapka, is solicitous after the memorial service, keeping an eye on June’s alcohol consumption, which is lots. Then her marriage breaks down and she comes home, with farcical timing, interrupting a possible liaison for her stepmother.

Tom Tassone has a short time on stage but so completely nails the hard-bitten, and indeed, devious journalist who has a little scoop in mind.

Peter Davies, plays Dougie, though he’s referred to as The Suit. The suit was bought by Sam after an accident in Blackpool, and Dougie bought it from the Oxfam shop to which it had been consigned. He’s unemployed, unemployable, with delusions of adequacy. June picks him as a fantasist right away. Davis, a highly experienced and versatile stalwart of Adelaide theatre, catches the weakness of the character perfectly, and you are not surprised by the denouement when he’s caught in the wrong dressing gown.

In the final moments, having absorbed the news that Sam has lied to her about his first wife, June realises that Sam’s diary idea was this way of keeping him alive in her life. She has had enough and throws him aside. Her life is hers.

The scene changes are accompanied by short bursts of popular hymns, delivered with the finest of Anglican delivery. I wasn’t the only person in the audience humming along. One of my favourites features. Who would true valour see, let him come hither. Who would a really fine, touching, and neatly crafted play see, should go the Arts Theatre.

Playwright, Keith Waterhouse, was a newspaperman when Fleet Street was the hub of the UK journalistic universe. Adelaide has always, realistically, been a one-newspaper town. The creative energy, business, and personality of the journo world were never part of our experience. How interesting, then, that Adelaide has just had the chance to see that world when the Adelaide University Theatre Guild premiered Ink! At one point, there’s a mention of Sam stealing a journalist from The Sun, the newspaper that young Rupert Murdoch bought.

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