By Joyce Morgan
The Appleton Ladies' Potato Race
Ensemble Theatre, March 26
★★★★
It's not a level playing field. Whether it's wages, superannuation or seats at the cabinet table, women lose out.
Valerie Bader and Merridy Eastman in The Appleton Ladies' Potato Race.
That's the big picture. The joy of Melanie Tait's sparkling new comedy is using a micro event – and they don't get much smaller than a potato race at a country show – to take a light-hearted look at inequity and a clash of cultures.
On the eve of the Appleton show, city-trained doctor Penny (Sharon Millerchip) returns to the rural town where she grew up. She learns the show's annual potato race awards $1000 prizemoney to men and just $200 to women.
Simple. She'll fundraise to equal the prizemoney. But Penny hasn't banked on the opposition she'll encounter, especially from other women.
From her battler hairdresser cousin Nikki (Amber McMahon) to the show's organiser Bev (Valerie Bader), soon they're spitting chips at this vegetarian, lesbian, city-slicker blow-in.
Women do the heavy lifting in the town and in organising its show. Yet they accept, even welcome, the race's disparity.
It's tradition, after all. And women race with lighter potato sacks than men. Oh, how familiar such rationalisations sound.
If the hot-potato events seem improbable, Tait's play was inspired by her experience last year in the NSW town of Robertson. She stepped in to equal the prizemoney for its annual potato race and copped a social media battering for her efforts.
With a light touch and crisp dialogue, Tait holds attitudes up to ridicule not the characters themselves. She plays the ball not the man or, in this case, the potato not the woman.
In a taut 90 minutes, the playwright's affection for her five well fleshed-out characters is clear. There are no villains of this feel-good piece.
Each is changed by the politics of the potato race. None more so than mousey committee woman Barb (Merridy Eastman), whose transformation is moving and funny.
Interwoven is refugee Rania's (Sapidah Kian) battle for acceptance in the white-bread town where spuds, not goat curry, are the staple.
Priscilla Jackman directs with energy a strong all-woman cast. Millerchip brings naivety to her central role as Penny. McMahon is a cracker as the feisty, athletic, potty-mouthed Nikki. Bader's knowing pauses and comic timing as she sheds the chip on her shoulder are a joy.
Michael Scott-Mitchell's simple set of wooden fruit crates suggests applecarts about to be overturned.
Yes, change is possible, on and off stage. As a footnote, when Robertson ran its potato race this month, it offered equal prizemoney.