Senuri Chandrani, centre, and her ageing parents, left, Felicity Steel and Chris Wallace in The Human Voice.Credit:Benjamin Sheen
Blacker comedy arrives with Jean Tong’s 3am, where a needy third wheel drives a lesbian couple (Cat Spiker and Amarachi Okorom) into a spiral of manipulation and emotional absence. It has a neat counterpoint in Ang Collins’ Old Friends, which crafts a quietly observed intimacy that sees two old flames (Cat Spiker and Ross Dwyer) reuniting.
More surreal fare disrupts the naturalism. Fiona Spitzkowky’s Tap Goof uses tin cans and a piece of string as a metaphor for mental unravelling, while Lewis Trenton’s 1800-RealTalk constructs a hyperreal wrestling match between a call-centre counsellor (Mason Phoumrath) and an outraged lawyer (Alex Hines).
Woven throughout is Georgia Symons’ Sunday, a three-hander with a woman (Senuri Chandrani) and her ageing parents (Felicity Steel and Chris Wallace) holding ordinary family conversations at decade long intervals. Poignancy emerges from the mundane, from what is left unsaid or worn into verbal habit, though it ends with a metaphysical twist that feels too pat to generate the intended uplift.
With so many different writing styles and concerns in the mix, The Human Voice could easily have been a dog’s breakfast. It is a tribute to the creativity of the design team and Benjamin Sheen’s emotionally intelligent direction that it flows with dramatic ease, that each scene feels integral to a larger conversation.
