Above : The cast with Director Annette van Roden (front row second from right) and Assistant Director Todd Beilby (back row far right)
Bobby (Luke Baweja) and Rachel (Sarah Croake) in EXIT LAUGHING
The setting is the early 2000s in the deep south of America. Connie is waiting for a few friends to come over to have a game of bridge. It is their first game they are playing since friend and regular player Mary died. Sassy Leona arrives looking forward to have a game. The mood changes in a big way when Millie enters the scene carrying a large antique urn. Connie and Leona are aghast when Millie tells them she has stolen the urn from the funeral home and that the urn contains Mary’s ashes. Millie talks to the urn as if Mary is still alive.
The play’s title isn’t a reference to an actor exiting the stage but instead a reference to making the most of the closing chapters in our life as fun and as bright as possible. If you come to see Elliott play, you will find out that ‘from the grave’ Mary makes this much prospect much more likely for her friends.
Director Annette van Roden, together with Assistant Director Todd Beilby, kept the action moving well, and together with her design team, Thomas Black (a finely detailed and appealing set) and Gerry O’Donoghue (lighting), created a stage world for the actors to do their best work in.
Playing types, the actors inhabited their roles well.Phillipa Coleman plays the struggling single mother, Connie. Sarah Croake is her difficult daughter, Rachel. Playing Connie’s best friends are Julie Mathers as the formidable Leona.
Penny Church played the ditzy, vacant Millie. Luke Baweja is the high spirited young guy Bobby who has rejected Rachel on a first date and unexpectedly appears on stage later in a wholly different guise
Turn off the brain cells, or what remains there are of them, take your seats in the Hunter Hills theatre’s own quaint little theatre upstairs at Club Ryde, and simply go wth the flow with this bright comedy.
A Hunters Hill Theatre Company production, Paul Elliott’s EXIT LAUGHING is playing the HHT theatre in Club Ryde until the 29th March 2026. Performance times are weekly Friday nights at 7.30pm and Saturdays and Sundays at 2pm.;
