A Limited Season: Extended

Mark Nicholls

Mar 2019 · Prahran Publishing

About this ebook

 Showfolk duo Joan and Peter defer the usual pre-lunch cocktail and anxiously await the arrival of their bright new young director.  Reviewing their career high and lowlights to date, this exciting new project promises them a big break in the face of their comically fast-maturing professional viability.  At this point, when their careers are about to go over the top, the action of the play retreats 40 years to the world of personal and professional security they enjoyed in the 1970s.  Married less to their respective spouses, Ian and Audrey, than they are to the spotlight, Joan and Peter are about to discover that they have been paying no attention to what has been going on in the real world back-stage. Shock and bemusement are bits of business they can perform, but little convinces us that Joan and Peter achieve any insights about love or life in this backstory to the show that inevitably and incessantly goes on.

About the author

 MARK NICHOLLS has been performing on various Melbourne stages since the age of six and has an extensive list of credits as a playwright, composer, singer, actor, producer and director.  He is Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne where he has taught film since 1993. 

He is the author of Lost Objects of Desire: The Performances of Jeremy Irons (2012), Scorsese’s Men: Melancholia and the Mob (2004) and recently published articles on Italian Cinema, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and Sergei Diaghilev’s celebrated company, The Ballets Russes.

Mark is a film critic and worked for many years on ABC Radio and for The Age newspaper, for which he wrote a weekly column between 2007 and 2009. 

He lives in Melbourne with his partner, Ali Wirtz, and their two sons Oscar and Carlo.