Brisbane review - Award Winning Comedy “Hot Tub” Makes a Splash!

By Lilian Harrington

Production:  Hot Tub

Writer:          Lewis Treston

Company:    Ad Astra

Location:     210 Petrie Tce. Brisbane City

Season:        August 3- 29 Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday evgs.@ 7 30pnMat Sat. at 2 pm

  Bookings    www.trybooking / Hot Tub, or 0417 001 292,

This Australian tragic- comedy dream fever, directed by Daniel Lammin, for Ad Astra is written by young Aussie writer Lewis Treston, who grew up on the Gold Coast. He has set Hot Tub on the Gold Coast in the middle of “Schoolies Week”. It follows the story of teenager Dido Hunter, played by the talented Grace Lofting, who comes from Townsville, in North Queensland, to join Schoolies and to find her estranged father Murray Hunter (Sandro Corelli), who runs a business at “The Great White Tower” with his mother-in-law Eunice White (Sarah Speller), where both of them are being secretly investigated by the AFP, Macka (Daniel Johnson), and local Police Officer Sheryl ( Ruby Gudenwwager), because they have dealings with the local Bikie Gang.  The seventeen -year- old, unsophisticated and innocent Dido, catches up with her father’s rather bizarre and questionable life and his new weird family, the Whites. She asks her father for a loan of $32,000, for a tummy -tuck operation in Brazil, so she can be slim and beautiful, and maybe swim with the Dolphins, in Townsville. Her father refuses, so she teams up with her gay and devious step-brother Reese, (Lachlan Brayshaw), to work on- line. He is the teenage son of Dido’s eccentric, fortune -teller, step-mother, Jade White, (Natasha McDonald). Murphy’s Law prevails and the Hunter -White Co. fortune takes a drop, so Murray and Eunice do a deal with a Bikie Gang in order to save The Great White. But even the efforts of his very loud and loopy wife Jade, to win money by gambling, is not enough to save The Great White.

Treston has highlighted the glitzy, seedy and affluent side of the Gold Coast through this family of bogons. He also reveals its dark side and the vulnerability shown by some schoolies, through the actions of Reese and Dido. Reese is played as a rather selfish, spoilt, rich, private school -boy, who is an online influencer and he becomes very coercive towards the vulnerable Dido, when he gets her to work with him online. Coupled with the well-intentioned actions of the matriarch grandmother Eunice, these actions only serve to contribute to the underlying problem that exists with life on the Gold Coast.

The Pluto Theatre at Ad Astra is a small stage, and in order to get the right effect for this play the set was designed very simply with a sandy -colored carpet and deck chairs which were used in a variety of ways to form different scene setups. The actors do not leave the stage but sit motionless on the side of it once they have exited the action. At times the dialogue was very rushed and loud and the action called for some strong strobe lighting and sound effects as well as some radical costume changes, but it all flowed well and it was well orchestrated, even the unaccompanied solos that were sung as part of the overall message in the play.

This is an award-winning play; it won the Patrick White Award at Belvoir St. in Sydney and it deserves to be played on the modern stage. The audience remained very focused and they enjoyed the humor and intention in Hot Tub.