Gareth Davies, Tina Bursill and Michelle Lim Davidson Photo: Brett Boardman
Fast, funny, refreshing and poignant – Feather in the Web is all this and more. It’s also unpredictable, original and downright entertaining, and its cast of four are uniformly and individually fabulous. A black comedy that is both weird and wonderful, what more can one ask from an evening at the theatre?
What seems to be a series of wacky and very funny sketches centring on the love affair of Miles (Gareth Davis) and Lily (Michelle Lim Davidson) gradually – very gradually – takes shape as a more sombre tale. But right at the start, we meet Kimberley (Claire Lovering), instantly established as a girl who has no boundaries. (At an improv workshop later in the play she’s told, imagine “you’re just a girl in a void”, to which she responds: “Way ahead of you there.”)
Michelle Lim Davidson and Gareth Davies Photo: BrettBoardman
Kimberley is the unwanted third party in this love triangle, and she is infatuated. What she’ll do to push Lily out of the way makes for some very funny moments as well as pointing up the cruelty of Miles. The fourth member of the cast is the wonderful Tina Bursill, variously a mother, mother-in-law, improv teacher, party planner and harbinger of migraines (whoever or whatever she is, she’s brilliant – but then they all are). Davies, too, takes on multiple roles and is especially memorable as a drunk office manager and a depressed psychiatrist.
But one of the great things about this absurdly comic play is writer Nick Coyle’s astute observation of people and their foibles and his unerring ear for dialogue. It’s spot on, and it is delivered with great panache by this gang of four under the direction of Ben Winspear. Whether it’s picking the conversations between young women and what they need for a weekend away, honing in on obsessions, negotiating office politics or trying to deal with cancer, it’s all there in spades.
This is not a play with a neat synopsis and a neat ending. You need to experience it for yourself to see what it’s all about. Please do! You have until 17 November.
Feather in the Web is at the Griffin Theatre Co, Stables Theatre, Kings Cross until November 17.
