The scenes exploring the procedures of the funeral home are the most successful. If I was Steve, I’d want to run too, and they don’t appear to talk to each other as much as they do middle distances, the chemistry falling flat. The rather twee domestic scenes are not helped by the one note characterisation of Claire who bounces around the stage like a bubbly teenager.
His fiancée Claire (Sophie Cox) is obsessed with the wedding and Steve is over-stretched by the on call demands of his job.
#Drama left right dirty professional
The issue with the first half is that it is dedicated largely to ratcheting up the tension between Steve’s home and professional life in unsubtle ways. The characters slide in and out, as do the dead bodies. This is Pirie’s real life story, and he operates within it as conductor, stagehand, active player - a concentric motif, represented by a revolving stage and a roll call of ensemble characters played by all except the two Steve’s.
In a meta move, the playwright is also a character on stage watching Bourke playing a younger version of himself - because as he says, we might have wanted a nicer jawline to look at. Steve Pirie and Miyuki Lotz in Return to the Dirt. Not surprisingly the ropes prove to be confronting. Not prepared for what he’s getting into, he’s taken under the wing of veteran Deb, played with exquisite timing and verve by Jeanette Cronin - and shown the ropes. Return to the Dirt is about a guy in his early twenties, Steve (Mitchell Bourke), desperate for cash to fund his wedding, who lands a job at a funeral home. In this regard the first act is like a lukewarm bath - not until the second do I get incinerated. We’re told that boys should come and see it.īy the time I head inside expectations are high. It’s opening night and the speeches happen before the show - artistic director Lee Lewis telling us with lots of enthusiastic arm movements that Return to the Dirt had been selected for the tenth staged winner of the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award because it asked the big questions. Inside, the looping voice-overs advising of blackouts, swearing and references to suicide set the tone. I’d gleaned Return to the Dirt was about men and depression and suicide. I like to go in uninfluenced, and that’s hard these days, to avoid the trickle down effects of hype even for a play at the Queensland Theatre Company in the Netflix age. I head to the world premiere of Return to the Dirt by Steve Pirie without reading the press materials. Review: Return to the Dirt, written by Steve Pirie and directed by Lee Lewis, Queensland Theatre