Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Thursday 20th April 2023.
Olivia Jane Parker loves the 1950s movie, All About Eve. She now directs her own adaptation of the Joseph L Mankiewiez screenplay in this stylish performance for St Jude's Players. The title is only slightly misleading. Oh, yes, it's about Eve, but it's as much about Margo, as well.
Margo Channing is a highly successful stage actress, feeling that now, in her mid-forties, those mid-twenties roles are perhaps not as appropriate as they once were. Enter Eve. Eve Carrington arrives as Margo's greatest fan and, with a cocktail of lies and flattery, insinuates herself into Margo's life, taking on secretarial duties and eventually wearing Margo's clothes. Her tragic biography is completely fraudulent. What could be the prelude to a bizarre murder plot is far more intriguing and enjoyable. Eve wants to become the new Margo, taking her place centre stage.
So commanding are Rebecca Kemp as Margot and Leah Lowe as Eve, so impressively coiffed and frocked, it's at times difficult to notice the rest of the cast. There is a fine performance by Deborah Walsh, as Margot's devoted Birdie Coonan, and by Angela Short, as Karen Richards, a theatrical by marriage to playwright Lloyd Richards. Karen, under Eve's spell, plays the practical joke which strands Margot in the snow and allows Eve, the understudy, to take the stage. Confusion about what the character is doing is settled by the fact the bright red jerry can she carries has the word GAS in big letters stuck to its side.
Now we come to the fifth female role. Theatre critic Addison Dewitt, a part played originally by George Sanders, is now a woman, Joanne St Clair. The director's note in the program points to the work of such influential women writers of the 1940s as Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. The relationship between actress and critic may lack some of the sexual tension that Sanders brought to the role, but St Clair is very canny. Dewitt tumbled to Eve's cunning early on and confronts her, with the news that her life is now in the critic's hands. It couldn't happen in Adelaide of course.
There is a fine supporting cast, but the men can't help being outshone. Scott Battersby is playwright Lloyd Richards, totally adrift when faced with women's wiles, and Adam Schulz is Margo's boyfriend, Bill Sampson, and, like his namesake, done over by a woman, this one Eve and not Delilah.
Surrounding Margo are Steve Marvanek as Max Fabian, Ian Hart as Walter Stroud, and Jade Cooper, only referred to as Miss Caswell, whose pregnancy is a touch mysterious.
At the end of the play, Eve finds a young fan, Phoebe, played by Zoe Battersby, hiding in her dressing room. The story starts again.
Olivia Jane Parker's achievement in adapting the film script is just one of the so many aspects of the play that deserves loud applause. It was a little slow on the opening night, and there's a subplot that could be carefully excised.
Many of the St Jude's audience are of the appropriate vintage to have enjoyed the film when it first came out in the fifties. They probably recall the best line. 'Fasten your seatbelts; we're in for a bumpy night.' This highly enjoyable evening proceeds bump-free.
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