Sydney Reviews

Starts at Christmas and charts almost a year.

Jack Kearney’s kitchen sinker, Born on a Thursday takes three hours to traverse ten months, a calendar stroll through 1999. Did a year really unfurl at such glacial pace back then? 

April (Sofia Nolan) arrives in December. She’s returned from Denmark with a sprain, her brother, Isaac (Owen Hasluck), playing football, has damaged his brain.

Her mother, Ingrid (Sharon Millerchip), former soap star now pulling beers at the local RSL, treats her with disdain, neighbour, Howard (James Lugton) is in family retainer refrain.

Sweeping in with comic relief is the blowzy Estelle (Deborah Galanos) abrasive, brassy, acerbic, a bit of a pain.

This quintet comprises a quorum of lives founded on pain and insecurity and lack of togetherness. Underpinning the relationship between Ingrid, April and Isaac is an incident that has scarred them for life, one physically, all emotionally.

Constricted and ingrown, the narrative of Born on a Thursday is fixated on the febrile relationship between Ingrid and April and never finds focus on other strands of the story, but thankfully the performances are good enough to throw a cloak over this central failing.

Soham Apte’s set with working kitchen sink and hotplate stove and wide pane window garden vista is another triumph of substance and form, a realistic replica of suburban domiciliary.

Costume designer Rita Naidu has assembled an appropriate wardrobe mix of  nondescript blue collar and the ostentatious aspirational, the daggy and the gaudy, the coarse and the nuanced.

There’s chair with a wonky leg that everybody knows about but is never fixed.

Meet the seat of a metaphor. And the garden that Howard has been tending seems set for a symbolic ending.

Broken furniture and blossoming flora, see you later allegorical.