2025: Low Pay? No Pay! - Dario Fo, 2010 translation by Joseph Farrell

 

 

Low Pay? Don’t Pay! New translation by Joseph Farrell of Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! by Dario Fo.  
Canberra REP November 20 – December 6, 2025

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Nov 21

An uproarious new version of Dario Fo's frenetic farce Can't Pay? Won't Pay! which, although set in Italy, has an all too familiar ring to it. Housewives Antonia and Margherita, fed up with high prices in the supermarket, take matters into their own hands and start shoplifting. Keen to keep their light-fingered antics from their husbands, Giovanni and Luigi - not to mention the police - the women are forced to resort to more and more inventive hiding places, and more and more elaborate cover stories, in this legendary comedy. Nobel prize winner Dario Fo [was] Italy's leading contemporary playwright, renowned for his hilarious satires including Accidental Death of an Anarchist. He has re-written his classic farce Can't Pay? Won't Pay! to take into account the global banking crisis and this translation, by world-leading Fo scholar Joseph Farrell, hints at UK current affairs too, including the credit crunch and MPs' expenses scandal. Although first written in 1970, this updated farce is still very relevant to today's state of affairs. (https://www.amazon.sg/Low-Pay-Dont/dp/140813103X) 

Directed by Cate Clelland
Written by Dario Fo, translation by Joseph Farrell (Hachette 2010)

CAST
Maddie Lee – Toni        Chloe Smith – Maggie
Lachlan Abrahams – Joe    Rowan McMurray – Lou 
Antonia Kitzel – The  Actor 

Ensemble
Ben Zolfaghari - Stephanie van Lieshout - Ariana Barzinpour - Georgie Bianchini Rucha Tathavadkar - Sterling Notley - Rosemary Gibbons - Paul Jackson

CREATIVES
Cate Clelland: Set Designer; Stephen Still: Lighting Design
Neville Pye: Sound Design; Darcy Abrahams: Costume Design
Rosemary Gibbons: Properties Coordinator
Russell Brown OAM I Special properties construction

PRODUCTION
David Goodbody: Stage Manager: John Stead: Production Manager
Lachlan Ruffy: Assistant Director; Russell Brown OAM: Set Coordinator Elizabeth Goodbody: FoH Coordinator & Council liaison
TEAMS
Sets: Russell Brown OAM, Andrew Kay, Brian Moir, Wolfgang Hecker,
Eric Turner, John Klingberg
Wardrobe:Darcy Abrahams, Wardrobe Wenches
Lighting: Anne Gallen, Ashley Pope, Lennard Duck, Liz de Totth Sound: Andrea Garcia, Imogen Holland, John Maguire
Properties & Set Dressing: Rosemary Gibbons
Stage Crew: Emily Backhouse, Julie Barnes, Mae Schembri
Front of House: REP members & volunteers
Artwork & Promotons: Tiana Johannis Design, Helen Drum
Marketing: Victoria Dixon, Helen Drum 
Program: Helen Drum 
Promotional & Foyer Images: Ross Gould, Victoria Dixon


https://socialistworker.co.uk/obituaries/dario-fo-a-committed-revolutionary-who-stood-against-the-state 2016 

Italian dramatist Dario Fo, who has died at the age of 90, was one of the great artistic and political revolutionaries of the 20th and 21st centuries.

His death has prompted hollow eulogies from some members of the Italian ruling class. Make no mistake, however, the bourgeoisie despised Fo and the feeling was entirely mutual.

Fo’s great plays, such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! and Mistero Buffo (a one-man piece that confirmed Fo’s brilliance as an actor), are both spectacularly funny and savage in their satire of the rich and powerful.

So what on earth are all these people in the Canberra Repertory Theatre, based in the centre of Australian Government, doing?

Do they really support a Socialist Workers’ Revolution?  

You could certainly think so when the lead actors, Maddie Lee as Toni, Chloe Smith as Maggie, Lachlan Abrahams  as Toni’s husband Joe and Rowan McMurray as Maggie’s husband Lou, actually managed to make us believe in their characters, and even feel sorry for their plight as ordinary workers and wives in our world of continuous inflation, despite the absolutely zany, and therefore very funny, plot.

This is because of the clever way director Cate Clelland has combined an absurdist style of choreographed group work for the workers like police, council workers and so on – led by Antonia Kitzel – with the desperate attempts by the two couples to make sense of it all.

Then the moment finally comes where we understand the point of it all as our set of characters meld back in time with the backdrop picture of the Italian workers Dario Fo originally presented in 1976.

In other words, the message is, nothing has changed.  We can’t forget the intensity of people’s struggle to find toilet paper in 2007.

I don’t know how many REP members are public servants.  Enough I hope to cause more than a laugh or two in the appropriate policy departments in working out ways not only to better balance economic inequality, but also to manage zero damaging emissions of CO2 in the atmosphere before our world becomes even more impossible to live in than Dario Fo imagined.

Low Pay? Don’t Pay! is the kind of ‘comedy’ which must not be missed.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2025: The Almighty Sometimes

 

 

The Almighty Sometimes by Kendall Feaver. Off the Ledge Theatre co-presented by The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, 19-22 November 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Nov 20

Cast and Creative Team

Anna – Winsome Ogilvie
Renee – Elaine Noon
Oliver – Robert Kjellgren
Vivienne – Steph Roberts

Director/Lighting Designer – Lachlan Houen
Stage Manager – Lucy van Dooren
Set/Costume Designer – Caitlin Baker
Sound Designer/Composer – Marlene Radice
Movement Director – Kristy Griffin
Costuming & Marketing Assistant – Liv Boddington
Voice & Text Coach - Sarah Chalmers


Theatre off the ledge is exactly the right way of thinking about this remarkable production of The Almighty Sometimes.  Winsome Ogilvie enacts Anna’s continuous likelihood of emotional collapse in such detail in action, voice and expression of her feelings that one is amazed at her capacity and flexibility as an actor – while also feeling so sorry for Anna caught in the impossible confusion of her mother’s doing everything “right” and maybe even more than might be expected, for her child’s benefit.

Now, legally an adult, what will become of Anna?  What was was her “illness” in the first place.  Something we call ADHD I suspect.  As a young child she became an irrepressible story writer, but after her encouraging father died, her mother sought help to, essentially, calm her down and have treatment so that Anna’s obvious intelligence could be directed into her education.  As a teacher herself, this seemed sensible to Renee.

To quote Off the Ledge Theatre: Winner of the Judges’ Award in the prestigious Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting (UK) and the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Prizes for Drama, Kendall Feaver’s captivating play is a profound and compelling study of a young woman trying to discover where her illness ends and her identity begins.
 
As a teacher myself, I wondered if the issue of classifying some behaviours as illnesses, justifying drug treatments as the psychiatrist Vivienne – played very straight by Steph Roberts – does, was from the author’s personal experience.  

A fascinating interview in The Saturday Paper in 2020 (at https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/theatre/2020/11/28/playwright-kendall-feaver/160648200010780) doesn’t reveal the answer, but the importance of the play being presented – which I am sure The Q recognises – is that Anne’s experience, through to what seems to be no more than an isolated life in a ‘home’ from the age of 20, is that it makes a medical/political issue become real.  Made worse by how her blunt behaviour has ruined her possible relationship with old school friend Oliver.

Presenting The Almighty Sometimes is a valuable community contribution by the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre and Off The Ledge Theatre to the Australian Capital region.  Canberra has often led new developments in education.  With the expansion of social media on the internet, parent, teacher and children relationships are changing, and creating new and fraught issues, with attempts at control by banning phones in the classroom and even at school at all, and limiting social media accounts to over 16s.

I hope that this production’s short run can be followed by presentation on tour, hopefully with a secondary school program component.  

Establishing one’s identity, always the central concern for teenagers, is what this play is about, and it should not be missed.  I have my own memories as a 7-year-old boy who wrote poetry, and how I was treated - though long before modern psychiatry, no-one thought to class me as ill.  I got my own back when I got into Uni - the only one in my all boys' school class to choose to answer the poetry question.  So there!

Photos supplied:

Psychiatry session with Vivienne

Meeting up again with Oliver

Fraught lunchtime episode

 

One of the worst moments with mother
The Almighty Sometimes
by Kendall Feaver. Off the Ledge Theatre 2025

 

 

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2025: Equus by Peter Shaffer

 

 

Equus by Peter Shaffer.  Free Rain Theatre Company at The Hub, Kingston, Canberra, 12 - 22 November, 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Nov 14

CAST

Martin Dysart – Arran McKenna

Alan Strang – Jack Shanahan

Dora Strang – Janie Lawson

Frank Strang/Harry Dalton – Bruce Hardie

Hesther Salomon – Crystal Mahon

Nugget/Horseman – Sam Thomson

Jill Mason – Lily Welling

Nurse - Caitlin Bissett

Horses – Jamie Johnston, Finlay Forrest, Samara Glesti, Bianca Lawson, Robert Wearden

    

CREATIVES

    Director – Anne Somes
    Associate Director – Crystal Mahon
    Movement Director – Amy Campbell
    Set Design – Cate Clelland
    Director of Marketing – Olivia Wenholz


The drama Equus, based on a true report of a young man stabbing the eyes out of horses, is at its heart about a professional highly-regarded child psychologist becoming doubtful about the legitimacy of his work. 

Anne Somes’ production is top-class in design and acting quality – proof once again of the value of The Hub in our community.

Wikipedia records: The narrative centres on religious and ritual sacrifice themes, as well as the manner in which Strang constructs a personal theology involving the horses and the godhead "Equus". Alan sees the horses as representative of God and confuses his adoration of his "God" with sexual attraction. Also important is Shaffer's examination of the conflict between personal values and satisfaction and societal mores, expectations, and institutions, and between Apollonian and Dionysian values and systems.

For me, now 50 years on from the first production of Equus, personal confusion about one’s “God” and sexual attraction – which makes the play powerfully dramatic – is not the personal issue.  Canberra is replete with professionals, whose doubts about Apollonian and Dionysian values and systems make the character of Martin Dysart the one we can identify with.  

At a more purely bureaucratic level, consider the years of conflict and emotional confusion in the life of whistle-blower Derek Elias, assistant secretary for regional processing contracts in the Department of Home Affairs since 2019, reported in detail this very day as I write, November 15, 2025, in The Saturday Paper.

While the blatant male nudity in the final scene of Equus is no longer surprising and certainly not as controversial as it was in 1973, it brings to light Dysart’s dilemma.  He has engineered his patient into acting out what really did happen when he and the girl who worked with him in the horse stables met, presumably for his first sexual experience.  We experience watching how a young man’s twisted imagination, worshipping his all-knowing “god” named Nuggety, leads to emotional disaster and the blinding of the horse.

This is drama at its most demanding of our sympathy, even empathy if we dare, especially in close-up in the intimate space of The Hub.

So, what does Martin Dysart worship?  Not a horse, but the belief that he can really make a deluded child patient become normal – whatever “being normal” means.

This is where the writing skill of Peter Shaffer comes into play.  The essence of great theatre, as we all know from Shakepeare, is universality.  We all have our Nuggety.

Mine was my worship of the two young lads in autocratic Portugal who publicly raised a toast to freedom, leading to the establishment of Amnesty International in 1961.  In 2004 I represented Amnesty on the Australian Government Working Group responding, as Australia was required to do, at the end of the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education.

In the meantime I came to understand the necessity of the Arts – and in my case Drama and Theatre – in education, as basic to the understanding and practice of human rights.  It’s fair to say, I guess, that though my 33 years as a full-time professional teacher, trying often to achieve Martin Dysart’s aims in my own way, ended in 1995 as prostate cancer made its play – I’m still a human rights educator through drama as a nowadays unpaid reviewer.

So Equus means a great deal to me, even if I look around and wonder if Amnesty International is still as great a god for good in the confusing world of self-induced climate change, as I had hoped when I turned 20 in 1961.

See Free Rain’s Equus, find your Nuggety, and open your eyes to world betterment.

 

Lily Welling as Jill Mason – Jack Shanahan as Alan Strang 

©Frank McKone, Canberra