★★★★½
Peter Goers may be one of the few Adelaide performers who could walk on stage as Sheridan Whiteside and make the audience feel the casting joke before the first barb has fully landed. Following his successful return to the stage last year in Harvey, Goers now plays the acerbic theatre critic and radio star in Adelaide Repertory Theatre’s The Man Who Came To Dinner. It is ideal casting.
Goers, the former 891 ABC radio host and longtime critic, brings his own public mythology into the room. He knows how to weaponise a pause. He knows how to enjoy a line before he says it. Most importantly, he knows that a good insult should feel like it has been sharpened for years.
Written by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, The Man Who Came To Dinner premiered in 1939. Hart and Kaufman were among Broadway’s great comic architects, also collaborating on You Can’t Take It With You, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Kaufman was also a critic and newspaperman at The New York Times. Much of this play’s pleasure comes from the sound of a critic letting fly.
The play begins with famous radio personality Sheridan Whiteside slipping on ice outside the Stanley family home in small-town Ohio. Confined to their house, he turns their lives into a circus. He commandeers the telephone; he insults the doctor. He belittles the nurse; he banishes the family upstairs. Then the celebrities, convicts, penguins and chaos begin to arrive.
Director Sue Wylie’s production understands that this is not only a farce. It is also a study of fame and flattery. Whiteside is repulsive when he demeans the “ordinary” people around him. The cooks, the nurse, his hosts and the local doctor are all treated as furniture until they become useful.
Yet when actors, playwrights and society figures enter the Stanley household, his cruelty suddenly seems less monstrous. It becomes social currency. He is no longer a bully; he is one of the crowd.
That is the play’s cruellest joke. Wit can be celebrated if you are good enough at it. Cruelty can be excused if it happens in the right room. Whiteside’s name-dropping of Walt Disney, the Khedive of Egypt and every other glittering contact can feel absurdly pretentious. But almost everyone who enters the house is also chasing proximity to him. They want to drop his name too. Fame may be the ultimate form of flattery.
Goers is at his best when Whiteside turns charm on and off like a tap. One moment, he makes someone feel destined for greatness. The next, he tears away their hopes because they have become inconvenient. There is a genuine question beneath the comedy. Does fame require that kind of self-centredness? Or do we simply reward it so often that it starts to look necessary?
Jess Corrie is terrific as Maggie Cutler. Fresh from her award-winning turn as Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, she goes toe-to-toe with Goers and lands plenty of punches. Maggie is the one person in the room who can see through Whiteside’s theatre and still love him enough to fight him. Corrie gives her warmth, intelligence and a firm spine.
Michael Griffiths makes a delicious entrance as Beverly Carlton, the Noel Coward-inspired society figure. Griffiths has form with this period, having won acclaim for his cabaret work on Cole Porter.
Here, he is all high camp ease. He flicks the fringe, tinkles the keys, swans about the room and exits while making the simple act of putting on a coat feel like choreography. It is a coup for The Rep to have him in the cast.
Helen Geoffreys arrives like a storm front as Lorraine Sheldon. She pops her lips, sways her hips and angles every syllable as though the room has been built to admire her.
Robert Cusenza is equally memorable as Banjo, the Harpo Marx-inspired agent of anarchy. He flips across the chaise lounge, tips himself upside down in the wheelchair and waltzes into the wings with dangerous abandon. At times, you worry for his hips.
Julie Quick is a hoot as Harriet Stanley, the strange sister with a shady past. You have met her type somewhere near Burnside Village, though hopefully not near an axe.
Brenton Whittle and Rebecca Kemp make a strong team as the exasperated Ernest and Mrs Stanley. Their house has been invaded by celebrity, and they wear the polite terror beautifully.
The stage is packed with a battalion of supporting players, including Christopher Cordeaux, Penni Hamilton-Smith, Tianna Cooper, Linda Lawson, Greg Janzow, Matt Chapman and others. You wonder how many dressing rooms are backstage. You also wonder where they store the props.
The production seems to contain crates of penguins, a cockroach hotel, antique vases, a staircase, a library, a dining room, a wheelchair, and an enormous gold sarcophagus. There is even a grand piano for one song.
The set gives the Stanley home the right sense of respectable life under siege. Double doors open to further rooms. The staircase leads to the upstairs exile where the Stanleys have been banished. Every object seems to be waiting for either a punchline or a disaster.
You don’t put a gun on stage unless someone’s going to use it. You don’t put penguins on stage unless they are going to bite.
Some of the satire does depend on period references. Harpo Marx, Noel Coward, Alexander Woollcott and the social world of the Algonquin Round Table may land more sharply for some generations than others. The program helps, offering a useful glossary and background material.
But the names are not always the point. The point is that the names are being dropped. They are used for status, leverage and shine.
At three acts, with a curtain drop between scenes in Act One, the evening asks the audience to settle into an older theatrical rhythm. It is not built with modern speed in mind. But once the machinery starts to accelerate, the pleasures are substantial.
Adelaide Repertory Theatre is South Australia’s oldest surviving amateur theatre company, and this production shows the scale of what a committed ensemble can attempt.
With Goers in the role he was surely destined to play, Griffiths dropping in like a champagne bubble with teeth, and a huge cast filling The Arts Theatre stage, this feels like a once-in-a-lifetime local alignment.
The Man Who Came To Dinner is a comedy of chaos, celebrity and ego. In The Rep’s hands, it is also a reminder that the sharpest tongues are often surrounded by people begging to be cut. It is Christmas in July, with claws.
The Man Who Came To Dinner is presented by The Adelaide Repertory Theatre and runs to 18 July 2026 at The Arts Theatre. 53 Angas Street Adelaide SA 5000.
Tickets: https://artstheatresa.sales.ticketsearch.com/sales/salesevent/159415
Website: https://adelaiderep.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theadelaiderep/
Photo credits: Richard Parkhill
