Above : Jessica Arthur,  Director of The House at Boundary Road, Liverpool. Featured image: Cast and creatives behind this world premiere play.

The chance to visit The House at Boundary Road, Liverpool is a very special one indeed. This theatre event is made up of four plays hurtling one after the other in a heady and compelling quartet of vignettes. The concise but complex scenes viewed in the same house over seven decades will have you laughing out loud, nodding and shifting even further to the edge of your seat.

This theatre experience offers audiences a glorious chunk of humanity from four cultural backgrounds and impressive writing via streamlined scripts. The plays take evocative snapshots of immigrant Italian, Filipino, Lebanese-Palestinian and Nigerian family situations from the 1950s to present day.

Above: two of the playwrights involved in this project, Violette Ayad ( top) and Jordan Shea.

These stories of families arriving in Sydney’s Liverpool are at once touching, funny, searching and shockingly real. We hear and witness various predicaments of assimilation, survival and other challenges both within the families and outside their Boundary Road location.

All scriptwriters have excelled in creating delayed and partial expositions. Their ‘plays within a play’ are slick events sans any clumsy or down times. Successful moments of comedy and celebration of identity or expression balance on a knife edge with harsh domestic drama and problems without immediate solutions. Underlying tension and historical family issues are often on the brink of bursting.

The believable scripts are boldly brought to life by a capable troupe of actors. There is exciting ensemble work here. Regardless of each type of issue or intensity of domestic clash depicted, some tight yet very sensitive direction from Jessica Arthur ensures the eleven actors make good use of Keerthi Subramanyam’s effective and timeless cutaway house set.

This drama’s verbal and physical interactions range from the achingly tender touch through passive aggression, violence and frustration through to youthful exuberance. On top of the realistic Australian cultural diversity, this huge range of nicely nuanced emotion delights over and over.

Above : two of the playwrights for this project: Chika Ikogwe (top) and Thomas De Angelis

Without supplying spoilers and giving away any details of the successful dialogue  and joyous cultural comedy, be ready for the hardworking Italians Anna and Roberto of 1950s Australia, and then the perky yet damaged Filipino brothers Este and Vergel with drunken father Jovy of the 1960s, searching for a family reunion of their broken diversities in the following decade.

Add to this the super-tense Lebanese/Palestinian sisters Lilian and Rima in the 2012 reminiscing and arguing outside the house and crumpling into their sisterly love after dealing with each other’s family differences and being the different girls in the Anglo society they grew up in and the momentum is ramped up thoughtfully.

The motifs of friendship, protective families, colour-blind crushing and a young hope to fit in makes for a suitable climax in this play’s final instalment following a Nigerian mother and daughter. It is a joyous piece, chockers with humour, beautifully timed tragi-comic gentleness and is a celebration of the capabilities, energy and gentleness of social climbing teen Chioma, her friend Ugo and firm but vulnerable and tired single mother.

Apple iPhone video and selfie ready, this action resonates and disturbs at the same time as we wonder at the state of our multicultural ‘house’ Australians currently share. All actors, so thoroughly embodying and promoting the best, worst and inflexible features of their backgrounds with historical accuracy for the relevant decade are to be congratulated.

With great scripts to work with by Thomas De Angelis, Jordan Shea, Violette Ayad and Chika Ikogwe, these performances are an instant hit and a very important new addition to our local theatrical canon. The blast from this play endures long after leaving Newtown’s Old 505 Theatre. It is thought-provoking firepower for our next decade of growth.