An excellent, thoughtful, funny, well-staged play that needed just one more rehearsal.

This is, in fact, a rewrite of Ben Elton’s first professional play, Gasping, and the rewrite seems, by the local and topical references, to have been quite extensive. The basic idea is that a gigantic mining company, Lockheart Resources, is running out of things to mine. Chifley Lockheart (Greg McNeill), the mining magnate with a heart of coal, points out that we’ve sold so much of Australia to China that most of its gone, and holds up a map with the middle cut out to demonstrate this. He delegates the problem to his number one, Sandy (Steven Rooke), and number two, Phillip (Damon Lockwood), that the problem is that they need more resources. Grandstanding Sandy comes up with all sorts of suggestions, but it is Phillip, who has an asthmatic girlfriend, Peggy (Lucy Goleby), who comes up with the one resource we all need; oxygen.

And so the Suck & Blow machine comes into being, from a design in a magazine for asthmatics, and Lockheart Resources goes into the business of producing designer air and, with the help of vampish Kirsten (Caroline Brazier), a PR genius, the...