Before I start the review fully, a personal peeve.

This is my second show at Pitt Street Theatre, and both started twelve minutes late. It is annoying. I get there on time. Both times I have been asked to move seats so some late comers can get the excellent seat I arrived early for. 

Stop doing this!

Antarctic Endeavours, written by Tom Smith, Alex Quinn and Ava O’Brien, is directed by Peggie Barnes with flair and a hefty dose of madness which is needed to fully flesh out the absurdist script and make some sense of it. If sense is needed.

Tom (Ethan Cranefield) and Suzanne (Stella Vaivai) newly-weds in 1949, are looking for a home big enough to encompass his speed-reading collection and her killing rooms which are only missing the elusive yeti.

It is now 81 years later.

Enter the real estate agent/narrator Joshua Hughes. 

With the traditional comedy and tragedy masks as epaulets, he proceeds to take their relationship through many a trial and many a house from skyscrapers to Tom’s Grandmothers home – a wonderful sequence – and finally ends up on the edge of Antarctica in a two square metre wooden space. All the while berating them to “behave and perform!”

And perform they do. Every acting style from film noir to melodrama including horror and game shows which these two splendid actors, young and earnest, do with energy and commitment. 

Into the mix falls Romeo.

Literally.

Lincoln Swinerd as Romeo is full of flourishes and beautifully created over the top moments which charm the audience and give us some breathing space from the relentless badgering of the narrator.

Joshua Hughes does a very fine job controlling the pace and energy and breaking down the 4^th wall to tell us that it is our duty to watch. How can we not watch this hugely entertaining piece of theatre with well-crafted performances from all.

These performances are enhanced by an outstanding soundscape – Alex Quinn – which, working with a bare stage, gives us fully evolved sound images so we can really see landscapes and shapes as if they are there. Extraordinary. 

Highly skilled young actors and crew chewing up the scenery and transforming it into a jewel of a show.

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The programme blurb reads: “For most people, the idea of venturing to the South Pole seems frightening, demanding, and yes, cold. But for Tom and Suzanne Denborough, newlyweds, who were married in 1949, it offers something more!”

As we file into the BATS Stage theatre, it’s impossible not to notice among the audience some rather famous faces (spoiler alert: Sir Richard Taylor et al.). But first we had to find our way to our seats, stumbling through heavy mist and chilly blue lighting like extras on the set of a B-Grade movie, a noir thriller supposedly set on the world’s windiest, coldest continent, Antarctica – but not. 

The moment the actors hit the stage fresh-faced fans in the audience cheer boisterously, like groundlings from Shakespearean times.

An impressive soundtrack created by Co-Writer Alex Quinn underscores the tumultuous journey of newlyweds Tom and Suzanne Denborough, delightfully performed by Ethan Cranefield and Stella Vaivai, as they’re led by their demonic Real Estate Agent (Joshua Hughes) from one awful piece of (sur)real estate to another, finally being forced to settle for a tiny shack (2 square meters) somewhere in Antarctica.

‘(Sur)real estate’ is perhaps the key to understanding this satire about confronting the terrifying, desolate, blank spaces of our imaginations (another spoiler: don’t assume this play is about the Seventh continent, climate change or conservation).

The script is cleverly co-written (perhaps a bit too clever) by the team of Tom Smith, Ava O’Brien and Alex Quinn, with lots of wry, literary in-house jokes. Sly flipping between genres from sci-fi, to musical, to horror, to melodrama and even a parody of Shakespeare, evokes a curious sense of voyeurism.

It’s as if we are watching the creation of a script as it evolves, the mise-en-scène from inside the head of the ultimate puppeteer, the evil Real Estate Agent performed with O.T.T. relish.

The Real Estate Agent even has his own Igor to manage props on stage and do his bidding, performed by Lincoln Swinerd (in a moment echoing the Rocky Horror Picture Show).

In fact, we the audience became unwitting participants in the world of the play when the lights are swung on to us.

We are invited to join in as complicit witnesses to playfully grotesque and barbaric storytelling as the Real Estate Agent manipulates and tortures his newlyweds, ‘his characters’ in ‘his play.’

Tom and Suzanne are slaves to the Real Estate Agent’s fickle ‘story’ because we the audience are watching and waiting, with our insatiable desire to be entertained.

And just when it seems to be getting rather dark and gothic, enter the dashingly handsome Romeo (yes, that son of Montague) – a gorgeous performance by the swoon worthy Lincoln Swinard – and our three characters finally get a chance to turn the tables on their tormentor.

The deft hand weaving this tricky, slippery story is Director Peggie Barnes, who helped the audience not to lose the plot (literally), whilst keeping the surprises coming.

I love being surprised by theatre. This creative team promised to entertain and entertain they do. Antarctic Endeavours is an intriguing title for an intriguing, surprising, roller-coaster of a genre-bending immersive play. Go on, go, and experience Antarctic Endeavours. I hazard a bet you’ll be entertained!

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