Arms & The Man

Michael Scott-Mitchell's set is built upon an enormous rotating stage. All white and beautifully latticed, it looks like a snow globe built to the scale of the world, assembled from sky-high sheets of laser-cut paper — beautiful, stiff, two-dimensional. 

Unfortunately, these same three adjectives also apply to the comedy of Richard Cottrell's production of Arms & The Man, played physically and big, such that it deafens the more subtle wit with which Shaw armed the script.

As a result Charlie Cousins' Sergius is a mustached mannequin, posed in parody of heroism and allowed but a few physical ticks for gags. His betrothed Raina (Andrea Demetriades), her father Major Petkov (William Zappa), mother Catherine (Deborah Kennedy) and the mercurial mercenary Bluntschli (Mitchell Butel), as beautifully dressed by Julie Lynch but more free to move, play at deceit backdropped by war as though in a British sitcom from the 1980s.

In the lower class, though, we find between Brandon Burke and Olivia Rose a greater depth to the comedy, a real sharpness that brings laughs instead of blunt guffaw of a pose.

Unexpectedly holding a half-full schooner of Reschs, surrounded by botoxed lips and bleached hair at Cronulla RSL for the Ode of Remembrance provided as much uneasy comedy, and much more to mull over in regards the glory of war.