Sydney is in the midst of short play fever at the moment with the annual ‘Short and Sweet’ Festival that reaches a climax on Friday 25th February with a Gala Final and Awards night. I caught up with the Festival at the Seymour Centre in the last week of January.

Program B Week 1 featured some eleven plays of widely varying subject matter, a mixture of hits and misses. My hit list….one of Sydney’s best actresses Kate Mulvany came up with a clever , anarchic, comic piece, ‘Naked Ambition’. The ambition of a pretty, young woman is do a streak of the cricket ground for Australia. Kate Box gives a great performance as the peculiar woman who covers herself with the Aussie flag but also has a crush on Brian Lara! …Another strong comic piece was Christopher Johnson’s piece ‘The Bar’. Guro Brand plays a young woman trying to fight her partner’s – a wonderful Mark McCann, addiction to chocolate. The pace is frenetic as McCanworks himself into a lather trying to enjoy his chocolates.

Our playwrights came up with some other interesting material; Chloe Schwank’s ‘Playing Dirty’ used as its springboard the gang rape crisis that swamped the Bulldog Rugby League team last year. The difference is that with Schwank’s play the genders are reversed with the players/rapists being women. Then there was Yasmine Clement’s quirky comic piece, ‘The Waiting Room’. How was this for an original scenario?! The play starts with a bridal party sitting patiently in the emergency ward of a local hospital waiting to hear about the fate of their Maid of Honour wounded in a struggle for the bride’s bouquet during the reception.

Summing up, the night featured some imaginative stuff from local writers combined with some good and committed acting. It will be interesting to see whether any of the night’s short theatre bytes will make it into the final and be voted the sweetest on the 25th.