Sydney Reviews

Entitled males, collusive females, toxic tribalism, pitiful ritual are all on show in Blank State Productions presentation of Willy Russell's Stags & Hens.

Written nearly fifty years ago, Stags & Hens feels both quaintly dated and monstrously contemporary.

The play opens with a gaggle of giggling and shrieking girls barging into the ladies loo at a naff disco mid way through that primitive premarital ritual, the hen night.

Linda is the bride attended by a quartet of besties including one already married, unhappily, or at least dissatisfied, yet compelled to offer her friend to the martyrdom of matrimony.

Having established the hens, enter the stags, the male counterparts entering the lads lav, the groom already paralytic, the boys all full of booze and braggadocio bravura.

Most of these fellows are benign, but the best man, Eddy, is a toxic tosser, alpha conservative, football loving, music hating misogynist.

Little do either party know that they have picked the same venue to celebrate the bride and groom’s last night of freedom, a situation fraught with traditional  superstitious folly.

It’s the perfect storm for a frothy revolving door farce but add the arrival of the bride’s ex, Peter, a musician who fled the stifling society of his home town and the storm front escalates into a more cyclonic drama.

Featuring an ensemble of Actors Centre Australia 2024 graduates Grace Easterby, Jonah Elias Benjamin Itaba, Kirra Jones, Chester Lenihan, Jonathan Serafino, Ellen Peebles, Ava McClean, Cameron Sutton, Hunter Taylor and Madeleine Zinner.

Under the direction of Johann Walraven, this production of Stags & Hens boasts a basic but effective and evocative split down the centre set design by Benjamin Itaba, complete with cubicles, urinals and working sink, augmented with mood loo lighting by Mehran Mortezaei.

This arrangement between New Theatre and the Actors Centre is to be applauded, giving a wider audience the opportunity to see the burgeoning of emerging talent.