This Year’s Ashes

Red Stitch’s latest theatrical offering starts simple – no talking, just plain sex – and that’s how leading lady Ellen likes it. Cohabiting with a family of cockroaches, she meanders her way through a perpetual haze of hangovers and one-night stands – her two-year long, vodka-fuelled cycle suddenly disrupted by an overly inquisitive bedfellow.

His persistence, and other forced interludes with unsolicited guests, peppers Ellen’s blurred existence with moments of clarity – be they hilarious or harrowing. Her unflagging devotion to The Ashes cricket Tests also offers a port in the storm, its colloquial commentary creeping in and around the scenes at play.

Jane Bodie’s script is intrinsically Australian and lyrically cunning, granting its three players (Daniel Frederiksen, Rosie Lockhart and Jeremy Stanford) a generous spectrum of emotion – which they deliver in droves from the humble setting of Ellen’s sparse, Ikea-furnished studio apartment.

Unexpected twists are spin-bowled into the narrative, and a slightly drawn-out first half will almost certainly be forgiven after interval. In short – a perhaps painfully relatable handling of loss – made considerably more palatable for fans of the gentleman’s game.

This Years Ashes runs till April 19 at Red Stitch Actors Theatre
Rear 2 Chapel Street, St Kilda East
For more info and tickets visit redstitch.net