A poignant, funny exploration of the hollowness behind a façade of wealth and popularity, a façade where art is a backdrop and which does not hide the loneliness of the house’s occupant. Written for four female actors, in deliberate counterpoint to Jennifer Compton’s reading of Pinter’s No Man’s Land, with its four male actors, The Goose in the Bottle harks back to the old story of the woman who raised a goose in a bottle. When the goose was fully grown, how could she free it without harming it or the bottle? How can we be fulfilled without paying a price?

A story about a girl who does what she wants, when she wants, and how she wants, who doesn’t accept the training she was born into. She destroys, but faces destruction herself when she falls in love, for as she tries to have her love requited, she loses much of what she essentially is. Blown about, light and beautiful as a feather, the girl becomes trapped, by love, in the web of conventional expectations.

Hilarious, shocking, lively, full of incident, poignant, this play has given us the front page of the Lysicrates website. A wonderful example of that Australian navigation of the narrow ridge separating tragedy from laughter.

Again, laugh out loud black humour, as three women face the mortality of the oldest one. Tart, sardonic and funny, the oldest woman has some of the best lines, and the audience loved them. The idea for the play was born as the author visited her grandparents, who lived to a great age, and came across a previously independent woman of 99 who was now totally reliant on strangers for the most basic bodily services. It deals with the uncomfortable fact that we are living longer, but not necessarily living well, as our bodies let us down.

The title of the play is about wanting to leave the party, to leave life, when it suits you, and nobody else, because the alternative is simply too frightening. An audience favourite, harrowing, horrifying, and uproarious.