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Sunset Boulevard: The Backstage Cut

Perth Theatre

Four stars

 

Everyone is a star in Morag Fullarton’s latest remake of a Hollywood classic. Following Casablanca The Gin Joint Cut and It’s a Wonderful Life… Mostly, this reimagining of Billy Wilder’s 1950 showbiz noir is scaled up to something more suitably epic after being first seen back in 2015 as a lunchtime show at Oran Mor. 

 

The appeal of putting it back on stage isn’t hard to fathom. Here, after all, is a big picture that mythologises its own world by way of what happens to screenwriter Joe Gillis. Gillis has become the accidental toy boy of faded silent movie queen Norma Desmond after being drafted in to write her back into the spotlight. While Norma is watched over by her devoted butler, Max, Joe teams up with script reader Betty Schaefer, who has her own plans for Joe. 

 

As if such a tangled web wasn’t already a multi-tiered potboiler, Fullarton gift-wraps her production by framing it with Wilder casting his new opus, and the already mighty Juliet Cadzow doubling up as real life screen star Gloria Swanson, who played Norma in the movie. Also on board is John Kielty stepping into the scene as William Holden, who played Joe, with Kielty also playing screenwriter Charles Brackett as well as Joe. Frances Thorburn steps up as well, not just as Betty, but as Wilder’s hyper efficient script girl who keeps the action going for the show’s pared down seventy minutes by prompting things along. Mark McDonnell, meanwhile, flits between an affable Wilder and what turns out to be a lovelorn fan boy as Max. 

 

This all adds several more layers to Fullarton’s fine tuned production, which fuses larger than life glamour and murder mystery intrigue with a deconstruction of Hollywood’s golden age that reunites her original cast in a show that has itself developed an impressive vintage.

 

Seeing Fullarton’s confection on a big stage is a treat that heightens its dark edged glamtastic appeal no end. As with Fullarton’s other contributions in her hopefully ongoing series of deconstructed old school matinees, she plays with the familiarity of her source material to pay homage, before twisting things in to view with a more knowing edge.

 

All four actors rise to the occasion on Fraser Lappin’s flamboyant des-res set, with Kielty an understated Joe, Thorburn a sassy Betty, and McDonnell a stoic Max. This is Cadzow’s show, however, as she vamps it up as Norma in a drop-dead portrait of a woman who is always on, no matter how imaginary her audience in a perfectly pitched show about making movies, with all the life and death high drama that entails.


The Herald, May 12th 2026

 

ends

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