★★★☆☆ A smart and sophisticated staging of a critically flawed play.

Sumner, Southbank Theatre, Melbourne
March 12, 2016

The play’s the thing, as the Bard so shrewdly observed, and it’s an adage that still rings true. The skill of an actor or the ingenuity of a director are, of course, of the utmost importance but they can only lift a production so far: if the text is flawed, then even the most high-calibre execution can still fall flat.

This conundrum is the lead weight that refuses to let MTC’s creatively realised production of Deborah Bruce’s The Distance soar. The premise of this play – a contemporary exploration of the expectations and struggles of motherhood – is, at least, intriguing. Mother of two, Bea (Susan Prior), has fled her life in Australia and returned to her native Britain. She immediately seeks out her two oldest friends, Kate (Nadine Garner) and Alex (Katrina Milosevic), who dutifully rally under the assumption that some marital catastrophe has ripped Bea’s children from her loving care. The reality is far less easy for them to empathise with, as it emerges that Bea, spurred on by a mental breakdown years in the making, has willfully abandoned her...