2025: Hand to God by Robert Askins

 

 Hand to God by Robert Askins. Presented by Everyman Theatre at ACT Hub at Causeway Hall. 10 December – 20 December 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Dec 12

Directed by Jarrad West

Cast
Michael Cooper as Jason (and the puppet Tyrone)
Amy Kowalczuk as his mother Margery
Lachlan Ruffy as Pastor Greg
Meaghan Stewart as Jason’s girlfriend Jessica
William 'Wally' Allington as Timothy, one-time school acquaintance.


Hand to God is an American play: embarrassingly funny; a crude satire. Yet, in the final scene of a young man’s mental breakdown, we see a reflection of America this century – even unto Donald Trump.

Though first produced in 2011, the teenager with his devil of a hand-puppet is an image that inevitably brings to mind that over-the-top ham actor’s extremities in his first Presidential Term 2017-2020, and currently.

Tyrone with Michael Cooper as Jason 
in Hand to God, Everyman Theatre 2025

 The point about the play is that it’s very funny – I would say terribly funny.  AI says The play is described as a "blasphemous black comedy (with puppets!)" that explores faith and morality and is intended for adult audiences due to its mature content, coarse language, and sexual references.  So, don’t take your chidren.

 

William 'Wally' Allington as Timothy, Meaghan Stewart as Jessica, Michael Cooper as Jason

 More – it really means, don’t take the children to America, where the diabolical Donald has Trumped – like Tyrone trumps Jason, destroying his faith in family –  even at the level of our international family.

In their small-town Cypress, Texas, Marjorie’s attempts to stay true to her marriage vows after her husband’s death, distracted by entertaining the faith community with puppets which go crazy, represent a world ruled by the dictates of an entertainer who believes he is the real thing.

Fortunately we still have the writers and performing artists we need to help us at least understand ourselves a bit better.

This is where the puppets and the terrific performances by Everyman come into the picture.

Once upon a time, many years ago when Drama was still not an independent school subject, I experimented with teachers of disaffected young teenagers using drama to assist with their education.  Using just one hand as theirself and the other as a puppet, what the hands said to each other, about behaviour issues, for example, could result in a new awareness about actions and consequences.  If the situation was managed by the teachers carefully and positively, of course.

In Hand to God, son Jason’s emotional dilemmas about his mother Margery’s struggles to find her way out of the grief and loss of her husband, while facing up to his own attraction to Jessica – and including the threat from Timothy’s sexual intentions towards both women – is simply not a situation that can be managed.

This is because they, including Paster Greg who is attracted, probably genuinely, to Margery, are all enclosed in an emotional prison.  There is no escape hatch; nor any independent non-interested outsider to help them manage.  Even in my teaching role, as my experiments showed, a successful change was difficult to achieve.

So in performing Jason, as he, as himself, talks with and argues with his puppet, who is also Jason – and in doing so instantly switching voice, mannerisms and feelings from one character to the other – Michael Cooper achieves an extraordinary feat as an actor.  From the very beginning, sitting alone (but with Tyrone) before any other characters have come on stage, I could respond at once to him, not as a puppeteer, but as a real person with some kind of special relationship with his puppet.

That degree of professionalism built throughout the cast and makes this production of Hand to God as good to see and engage with as I can imagine.

I fear, though, for America – and therefore for all the world – because Trump plays himself as Tyrone all the time, never revealing what we may hope is a real commonsense character hidden in himself.

The result is that too many people laugh – as we certainly did last night at The Hub – at the entertainment, and don’t realise that Marjery’s hope that her puppet show will create peace and harmony can’t succeed without true emotional intelligence.

The play ends deliberately without making it clear that the inordinate mess in the Church Hall, where everything is torn up and scattered everywhere, can never be put back in order.

Or maybe we might think that Margery’s final hug with Jason is an OK sign for the future.

For America, I guess, we haven’t got to the end of the play yet – but I’ve stopped laughing.  This is serious.

And I thank Jarrad West and everyone in Everyman Theatre.  

See Hand to God, but be careful of your mental puppets.

Michael Cooper, Amy Kowalczuk and Lachlan Ruffy
in the final scene of Hand to God, Everyman Theatre 2025

 ©Frank McKone, Canberra

 

2025: GOD

 

 

 GOD by Ferdinand von Schirach and translated by David Tushingham.  Lexi Sekuless Productions, with Rare Bird Ensemble,  at The Mill, Dairy Road, Canberra, November 26 - December 18, 2025

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Dec 5

CREATIVES & COMPANY

Cast
Rachel Gärtner: Heidi Silberman; Ms Biegler: Alana Denham Preston
Dr Keller: Maxine Beaumont; Dr Sperling: Timmy Sekuless
Bishop Thiel: Richard Manning; Professor Litten: Helen McFarlane
Chair: Jay James Moody; Council Associate: Sarah Hartley

Contingency and understudy for Dr Keller: Chipz Jin (playing Keller 230pm & 730pm 13 December)

Production Team
Writer: Ferdinand von Schirach; Translator: David Tushingham 
Director and Designer: Lexi Sekuless
Sound Designer: Damian Ashcroft; Costume Designer: Annette Sharpe
Shadow Costume Designer: Nicola Vavasour
Lighting Designer: Andrew Snell; Scenic Painter: Letitia Stewart
Set Builders: Revive Canberra
Production Stage Manager: Bea Grant
Deputy Stage Manager: Paige MacDonald 
Assistant Director: Eli Narev
Photographer: Daniel Abroguena

Producer: Lexi Sekuless Productions 
Principal Sponsor: Willard Public Affairs
By Arrangement with International Performing Rights Ltd


GOD asks the first question: when death knocks on your door, would you call the butler and tell them to let you out into the void?

But then a second question arises, since you and the butler are members of society.  What if the butler is afraid of being charged with a criminal act?

The drama is set in what seems to be Germany where a law has been passed to allow the butler to open the door, but only if they are a doctor qualified to judge whether you are of sound mind, but not of sound body – and so agree you would be better off dead.

But a 55-year-old woman has appealed to us to allow her to call death in, despite being sound of both mind and body.  This is because she had suffered for many months with her husband while he was dying in hospital,  where his butlers, the doctors, finally agreed to stop trying to ‘save’ his life; and she, his literally ‘other half’, cannot live without him.  A court has rejected her application as ‘unconstitutional’.

We, no longer a mere audience, sit on the official Council (like the Australian Capital Territory Appeals Tribunal) to hear the woman’s lawyer and a series of expert witnesses for nearly two hours (including a 20 minute tea break), before submitting our votes for or against her request.

The effect is dramatic, to say the least, as we bit by bit realise that our vote in that last ten minutes is not playing out a game of theatrical fiction.

Last night the 35 people voted 19 in favour, 15 against with 1 abstention.  On other nights, I’m told, the balance of votes was quite different, in different directions.

The value, in fact I would say the importance, of presenting this play is to marvel at the author’s amazing capacity, through the medical, social and religious ‘experts’ he creates, to takes us through something like the last three thousand years of the development of Western Philosophy, to the point where we feel sincerely that our decision is for real.

Then we realise how high is the quality of the directing and the acting on everybody’s part to shift our experience beyond mere observation and thinking about the issues, into a state of personal decision-making as we submit our votes (of course, recorded privately by the Council clerk, with only the numbers each way announced).

This is certainly my kind of theatre, becoming one in a tradition at The Mill Theatre, and definitively not to be missed – I say even if I am a generation older and biassed by my approaching the time I may decide I need the law to be on my side.

©Frank McKone, Canberra

2025: Twiggy - movie

 

 

Twiggy – A Film by Sadie Frost.  Transmission Films in cinemas from December 4, 2025

Reviewed by Frank McKone



There’s plenty to read about Dame Lesley Lawson (née Hornby) on Wikipedia under the name “Twiggy”.

But, you need to see this documentary to understand and appreciate what her life became as Twiggy, “The Face of 1966” when she was 15 going-on 16, through to the making of this memoir.

I feel guilty now that ever since that year, viewing her instant rise to fame from colonial Sydney, she seemed no more than a shallow sparkle of superficiality.  It was a mystery to me how an accidental shape could change fashion as if it really mattered.

Then as I approached viewing, I feared I would be watching nothing more than another form of commercialised or unnecessarily glorified history.  After all, since my reaction back in 1966, I had never followed her career.  I didn’t need to see more thin legs and over-long eyelashes.

How short-sighted I was!!

It turns out that Lesley Hornby, daughter of a practical and sensible tradesman, has never been a go-getting girl, seeking fame.  That was the last thing she expected.  I think, in the film, it is Dustin Hoffman who says how simply open and honest she is; while perhaps it is Charlotte Tilbury who speaks of how Twiggy is a great example of a girl growing into a woman.

I’m probably biassed the other way now, since I found her north London upbringing, though ten years after me, was in a house exactly like mine and my tradesman uncle’s semi-detached.  He was practical and sensible, too.

I mustn’t give you spoilers, but I think the key to appreciating her story is in an interview on TV when she was still a teenager, now among the upper-class of modelling.  She was asked “Do you feel at home among these people, since you come from a working-class background?”

Twiggy / Lesley just looked at this male interviewer, calmly, and simply said “Why not?”

She became a model, an actor, a partner, a wife, a mother, a success in many different ways – in other words a woman who says “Why not!”, and now tells her story first-hand in this documentary for the first time.

Enjoy. 

  
©Frank McKone, Canberra