WICKED SISTERS
GRIFFIN THEATRE COMPANY · NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2020
Presented at the Reginald Theatre, Seymore Centre, Sydney
Set & Costume Design Tobhiyah Stone Feller
Alec Hobbes, famed genius, social Darwinist and artificial intelligence researcher is dead. But his computer algorithm lives on, still working away in his study, and his widow Meridee tiptoes around the machine much like she did around her husband for most of their marriage. Her friends Judith and Lydia turn up to shake their friend out of her isolation and self-neglect. What promises to be a weekend of laughter and wine turns comically savage when Hester arrives and truths about the past start to tear at the fabric of friendship.
Alma De Groen tosses ideas like grenades, and they will explode with even more force in 2020 than they did in 2002, when Wicked Sisters premiered at the Stables. Back then, Australian stages were bereft of fiercely intelligent, independent, brave, elegant, witty female characters over 50, so Alma wrote this play. Like Margaret Atwood, her writing of women was way ahead of its time.
Text attribution: Griffin Theatre Company
“GALANos, whose Lydia - morally messy, burbling with life, somehow terribly vulnerable - brings sunlight to this tomb of a room. Waterman’s judith is crisp and severe, but you can see she is wounded.’
— Cassie Tongue, The Saturday Paper
“Adams’ scientist-turned-cleaner hester is resolutely dishevelled and demonstrably unpolished, and adams is so relaxed in her role she makes the whole stage come alive;she is the ease of the play”
— Cassie Tongue, The Saturday Paper
“It feels secretive, this room where the furniture is mismatched, probably cast off by other rooms in the house, and the ‘great man’ is very much in evidence. The slabs of oblique wooded structural beams and smoky glass walls speak to that architectural echo of 70s wooden houses on the escarpment. With an equally evocative design, the lighting shimmers with computer screen blue and the weakness of Mountains sunlight”
— Reviews by Judith
“As the double-crossings and deceits emerge, Hobbes’ “critters” wage their own ceaseless war above, projected in an eerie display on the glass walls of Tobhiyah Stone Feller’s set. The effect is degrading, savage and colD.”
— Kate Prendergast, Limelight
Credits & Acknowledgements
Set & Costume Design Tobhiyah Stone Feller
Director Nadia Tass
Playwright Alma De Groen
Composer & Sound Design, Video Design Nate Edmondson
Lighting Design Trent Suidgeest
Production Management Ryan Garreffa - Griffin Theatre Company
Stage Manager Isabella Kerdijk
Set Construction Pier Productions
Cast Di Adams, Vanessa Downing, Deborah Galanos, Hannah Waterman
Photographer Brett Boardman