Sydney Reviews

After twenty-one years with the Sydney Theatre Company, the Wharf Review has jumped ship, so to speak, dropping their anchor of satirical rancour and mooring at the York Theatre in the Seymour Centre.

The new show is called Can of Worms and it’s a wriggly receptacle of the disrespectful, a reservoir of irreverence, a repository of the irrepressible.

Phil Scott, Drew Forsythe, Jonathan Biggins and Amanda Bishop make up the quartet of wise-crackers, their barbs aimed predominantly at politicians, mostly at the homegrown hand shakers and baby kissers.

Premier positions in this piss take of pollies are taken by brilliant impressions of former New South Wales Premiers, Bob Carr and Gladys Berejiklian. Forsythe is forensic in his oratory of the well read intellectual Carr with a recitation redolent of Samuel Taylor Colleridge’s Kubla Khan taking poetic licence to essay current global tensions.

Amanda Bishop, who famously made an indelible impression with her impression of Julia Gillard years ago, nails Gladys Berejiklian, the former Premier now fronting an Armenian folk band and lamenting her fall from grace and power. “Bob Carr got the Olympics, I got a pandemic.”

Bishop is also hilarious as Jacqui Lambie who gives an outstanding stand-up spray that skewers the political system and its practitioners.

Forsythe is back again as the marvellously malappropriate Pauline Hanson, and frocks up for a turn as Queen Elizabeth II, suffering another annus horribilis, while Biggins is terrific as Donald Trump and Mark Latham.

As well as twinklingly tickling the ivories, Phil Scott tickles the funny bones with a string of stinging parody with lampooning lyrics set to purloined tunes ranging from The Sound of Music to the Wizard of Oz. The Come from Away skit, Go Far Away is mercilessly on point.

Scott’s take on ex Prime Ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd skews both Right and Left.

Angled by this quartet of agile quodlibetarians, Can of Worms baits its hooks with zinger lines, casting a wide comic net over the absurdities and abominations in our often cringe worthy world.