Geoff Allen and Leisha Ward-Knox in The Birthday, a clever whodunit styled as a 1920s silent film.
Short plays dish up comedy, murder, everything between with some pretty good acting.
Misfits, murderers, heroes and lovers all troop across the Herald Theatre stage this week in 11 short plays ranging from farce to melodrama.
Bruce Brown, the standout director of last year's Short+Sweet Festival, again gives us a highlight of quickfire conversation, Staged Madness, in which Kate Vox plays up marvellously
as an actress who, unlike her psychiatrist, can see through the fourth wall into the audience.
"It's not the Civic, but it'll do," she sniffs. "What's the play about?" the psychiatrist (Matt Norton) asks, indulging her. "It's pretty meta at this stage," is the amusing, honest reply.
Actors also play actors in two other playlets: a washed-up thespian threatens a young director (an assured Phoebe Borwick) with Lear's "sharper than a serpent's tooth" curse in Walking Shadow. And writer Finnius F. Teppett has fun with self-important luvvie types in Reading Lamouche.
