Play with music.
Set in a suburban pub-bistro on a Friday night. Two sexually dysfunctional and socially crippled males and three desperately unhappy and lonely women are brought together in a night of social tension and humour. They clumsily go about their courting rituals and displays of humanity as the influence of alcohol takes an ever-increasing hold.
After Dinner
1993
9738653
1993
single work
radio play
First produced at La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 20 April 1988. Transferred to Theatre Works, St Kilda and then the Universal Theatre, Fitzroy, in November 1988 where it completed a fifteen week run.
Director: Kim Durban.
Also produced in New Zealand, London and Dublin.
Performed by the Sydney Theatre Company at the Wharf Theatre, 15 January - 7 February 2015.
Director: Imara Savage.
Designer: Alicia Clements.
Lighting Designer: Verity Hampson.
Composer & Sound Designer: Steve Francis.
Cast: Glenn Hazeldine, Anita Hegh, Rebecca Massey, Josh McConville, and Helen Thomson.
Produced by State Theatre Company of South Australia at Dunstan Playhouse, 7-29 April 2018.
Director: Corey McMahon.
Sound Designer: Andrew Howard.
Lighting Designer: Nigel Levings.
Cast including Elena Carapetis, Jude Henshall, and Rory Walker.
'Thirty years old is a difficult age for a play in this country. Australian cultural memory is not exactly short, but it certainly tapers in the middle where such plays lie, flanked on one side by The Canon and, on the other, by The Next Big Thing. Andrew Bovell’s After Dinner – initially a melancholic one-acter for three women, later expanded and recast by the playwright for his drama school peers as a sort of boulevard comedy – feels exceptional in this regard: a not-quite-new, not-quite-old Australian play that has nevertheless entered the repertoire. On its completion in 1988, it played in Melbourne for almost half a year and seems to have been produced uninterruptedly since, including by Sydney Theatre Company as recently as 2015. In Bovell’s program note for this solid revival by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, he describes it, not wrongly, as ‘a classic comedy of the Australian theatre’.' (Introduction)
