After Dinner

Long before fully grown adult children justified the reckless amount of mason jars they consumed to celebrate the launch of their start-up with YOLO, in a place known as the 1980s, there was another license for licentious; YOYO: “You’re only young once.”

After Dinner both wholeheartedly embraces and playfully rejects that idea with Glenn Hazeldine, Anita Hegh, Rebecca Massey, Josh McConville and Helen Thomson frighteningly frocked up (Alicia Clements has designed this wonderfully, particularly Hegh’s outfit) for a Friday night at the local.

Andrew Bovell’s first play (written when he was just 21) never moves beyond this room, within which two sets of friends – three women and two men sharing between them a separation, a widowing, and all manner of other emotional maladies – collide.

The tight ensemble earn laughs revealing the impossibility of truly engaged conversation and the pressure and expectation of a large night out. Thomson is in her element: boisterous, big, and carelessly reckless, she recounts one of the night’s escapades played out of stage like a true barfly bard.

It’s absolutely laugh-out-loud good fun, but the sombre silences almost missed throughout the night resonate once the crowd has dissipated.

Wharf 1 Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company to 7 Mar