The Right of Reply

A playwright in Sydney has taken revenge on a theatre critic after a negative review was printed in the Sydney Morning Herald last week.

Mick Barnes, the writer of Unit 46, wrote an opinion piece printed in the same newspaper today calling on critic Jason Blake to 'sort out his melancholia'.

Barnes, a former critic himself, quotes from the book Rotten Reviews that says that reviewers "are a poor lot indeed, ill-paid, despised all around, and often wrong, but they have their pride."

Or more amusingly he also quotes Kurt Vonnegut who says they are "like a person who has just put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sundae or banana split."

The play which opened at the Factory Theatre in Marrickville is due to travel to the Edinburgh Fringe later this year after a rather successful run in Adelaide recently where it received positive responses.

Reviewers in Sydney have been a little less accommodating than their South Australian counterparts.

Diana Simmonds at Stage Noise called it "a horrid little piece and it's a mystery why anyone would want to do it; and a bigger mystery that it was apparently "the hit show of the Adelaide Fringe". Perhaps it was a crappy Adelaide Fringe year."

Helen Barry at Australian Stage said the play "is weighed down by ponderous slabs of dialogue which see the actors wrestling with intense soliloquies full of references to Greek mythology and lofty dead poets."

And my review printed in the Sun Herald, for what it's worth, is below. But you can make up your own minds. It closes at the end of the week.


Unit 46
Factory Theatre
Until 19 July
Tickets $25-28
Bookings (02) 9550 3666
Critic’s Rating 4/10

I have a friend who lives with extremely annoying neighbours in the inner west.

Noise complaints, barking dogs and bad taste in music is just the half of it. My friend has her revenge on them by stealing their wireless internet.

Whether or not it was the intention of playwright Mick Barnes, the blessing of Unit 46 is that you only have to spend 80 minutes with two of the most annoying neighbours you could come across.

Tim (Leof Kingsford-Smith) lives in the apartment above Diane (Lucy Miller) in a block of 56 units. Each night, they spend their time at home reflecting on their lonely existence and thinking of ways to annoy one another.

Tim, an angry misogynistic ex-public servant won’t put out the garbage. Diane, a chardonnay swilling English teacher living below, bangs the ceiling with every movement Tim makes.

The two actors are both fine performers who don’t miss a beat and manage to make their characters so aggravating the play becomes unbearable to sit through. Neither of them has any redeeming character traits, so you can’t help but feel that the playwright must have been in a very dark place at the time of writing.

Both are painfully neurotic and unremorsefully self centred that it makes whatever living conditions my friend is suffering practically angelic.

I’ll be recommending this show to her but, then again, she already has annoying neighbours.