Out of the Ordinary (play)
The play "follows the story of Theodora Sprout, a perpetually defensive, cynical and uptight twenty-something desperate to escape her wild parents".
He trolls right-wing chat rooms and believes he is partly responsible for the Liberal Party leadership spill.
Fran Edwards wrote that "Alex Vickery-Howe has written a fun piece of theatre with lots of laughs, but it does have a couple of serious messages.
'[5] while Jamie Wright praised 'Director Joh Hartog and his cast – particularly Steph Clapp as Theo [and] Robbie Greenwell as Wallace' for 'an excellent job in bringing Vickery-Howe's great dialogue to life; it's fast-paced but never rushed, and all whip out witty comebacks and zingers with perfect comic timing.
In her review, Georgina Tselekidis captures the thematic content of the play: As the story progresses, it’s easy to see this correlation between the characters and our own self-ego.
'She adds that 'director Joh Hartog and playwright Alex Vickery-Howe transform a simple context into an ‘out of the ordinary’ interpretation' and that the 'actors were strong and dominant, stealing the show in each of their scenes.
'[7] Like its predecessor, the play experiments with hyperreality by juxtaposing everyday relationships with 'sudden fantasy sequences, musical numbers, cartoonish projections and exaggerated sound effects.
The published play contains an introduction by Maggie Ivanova entitled The Art of Life: Aesthetic Engagements with the Everyday where she discusses the themes in detail, including 'the impulse in contemporary culture to amplify our experiences, no matter how mundane, in order to heighten their emotional intensity and make them worthy of dramatic replay - whether through personal reminiscences, tweets or Facebook posts'.
A world similar to those we see in comics and manga, which are dramaturgically evoked here, creates a primary reality that serves as a meeting point for separate expressive and experiential planes - Theo and Anni, thought and emotion, word and image, here and elsewhere.'
