REVIEW: Three Little Words - Ad Astra

Three Little Words

Ad Astra | Pluto Theatre

Written by Joanna Murray-Smith

Director: Greg Scurr

Assistant Director: Ellen Hardisty

Stage Manager: Kat Coomber

Sound Design: Greg Scurr and Peter Eades

Lighting Design: Daniel Endicott

Set Design: Greg Scurr

Fight and Intimacy Coordinator: NJ Price

Costume Assistant: Eleanora Ginardi

Production Assistant: Sarah Speller

“The whole world sees us as one thing.”

After seeing Three Little Words, I'm now more certain than ever that I should never get married. Seriously, if there's one thing I learned (aside from what a tantalus is), it's that couples should be obligated to go to marriage counselling before attempting to assemble IKEA furniture together.

Minor spoilers ahead. Joanna Murray-Smith’s Three Little Words has landed in the cosy Pluto Theatre at Ad Astra in Petrie Terrace. The married pairs of Tess and Curtis, and Bonnie and Annie, are seasoned friends who fit neatly into each other’s lives. That is, until Tss and Curtis decide to shake up their 20th anniversary celebration by announcing three little words that blow the evening apart: "We're splitting up". Suddenly, the once rock-solid stability of everyone involved begins to wobble.

The set, designed by director Greg Scurr, keeps us boxed inside the characters’ world. With brick walls, modern artwork, a full bookshelf, a dining table, a bar trolley and ample alcohol, the space slowly devolves from a stylish dinner party into emotional warfare. As our merry band of characters gets tipsier by the minute (and very convincingly act so), their etiquette and understanding fly out the window.

In the eye of the storm is Julie Cotterell as Tess, a book publisher who is highly articulate even while drunk, spiralling, or uprooting her life on what feels dangerously close to a whim. Tess explains how she has moved from the role of a daughter, then a wife, then a mother... And now she is stuck inside an identity crisis so large that she starts swinging it at everyone around her. She talks a big game about desiring freedom, but cannot properly express what she wants. This duality makes her character simultaneously fascinating and frustrating, hypocritical and sometimes just plain mean; and Cotterell never sands down those jagged edges. She starts off looking groomed and composed but by the end, she is giving off feral goblin energy.

Cameron Hurry is superb as Curtis, Tess’s seemingly supportive husband (or at least pretending to be). Since the character is a teacher, Hurry captures that trained instinct to keep calm, absorb, encourage, and put on a brave face, even as the ground is disappearing beneath him. There is an easy awkwardness to his humour that makes Curtis unexpectedly endearing, which caught me off guard because I found myself thinking, “Wait, am I sympathising with a man here?!” Hurry plays the early restraint beautifully, letting Curtis’s hurt leak out before the dam finally gives way. And that slow release predicts his eventual messiness still to come... because nobody gets to stay on the morally high ground in this play for long.

Hurry and Cotterell are particularly gripping (and vicious) in their final scene together, where the polite wreckage of their marriage becomes a full war of the spouses. Years of resentment are pulled out and sharpened - earnings, intellect, ownership, self worth - are all dragged into the fight. Cotterell and Hurry (and fight coordination by NJ Price) handle the scene with the kind of trust and rigour that makes it appear believably dangerous. Every insult lands like it has been waiting years for permission. Luckily, they never really turn their teenage daughter into a weapon, because by that point I was starting to see a little too much of my own childhood in the room. The focus stays on the adults and their collapsing sense of self, which is painful enough.

As Annie, Bianca Butler Reynolds is sweet-natured, passive, and quietly wounded in a way that sneaks up on you. Annie seems like the fun and softer presence in the group, but Reynolds allows us to see the little fractures underneath. She has a lovely lightness on stage, never overplaying when Annie is hurt, which makes it all the more impactful.

Nicola Jayne (NJ) Price as Bonnie is cool as a cucumber on the outside, but that calm is not emptiness. Price gives Bonnie a deliciously composed presence, all sharp eyes, sharper wit, and the kind of confidence that can make a room behave. Bonnie is observant, stylish, and capable of slicing through everyone else’s nonsense with brazen honesty. Her explanation of a mid-life crisis is marvellous: the boredom, the discontent, the self-sabotage, the desperate reach for some “spiritual awakening.” Bonnie is here to tell you that what waits on the other side is not enlightenment, but a barren battlefield.

Together, Price and Reynolds make Bonnie and Annie’s relationship just as compelling as the louder collapse happening beside them. Their dynamic is like a well-worn pair of mismatched socks: comfortable but just a tad prickly. They begin as the couple observing the disaster, reacting, gossiping, judging; but of course they are not safe either. Tess and Curtis think their split will be civil and sensible. Bonnie and Annie think they are only witnesses. Everyone is wrong.

Everybody's strong acting abilities made me believe these people have indeed been tangled up in each other’s lives for twenty years. It is in the body language, the shared memories, and even the story of how Tess and Curtis first met, which has the looseness of a tale retold too many times at dinner parties. That history makes Bonnie and Annie’s position in the fallout especially messy as they become like the children of the separation, stuck between two parents who keep pulling them aside to talk about the other. Bonnie and Annie listen, report back, swap loyalties, and give some dreadful advice.

I love that Joanna Murray-Smith’s writing never hands us a clean side to stand on. People say cruel things while trying to sound enlightened. They ask for freedom while demanding control. They insist they are not clichés while walking directly into cliché-shaped potholes. I also appreciate that the play does not pretend Tess’s chase for selfhood comes with any easy answers. Singlehood does not magically fix Tess. From where I’m sitting, it looks more like another room with different wallpaper and the same unresolved problems.

Director Greg Scurr and Assistant Director Ellen Hardisty handle all the overlapping dialogue, rapid emotional pivots, and boiling tension. The blocking keeps the room active, with no one ever quite able to escape each other. The production earns so much from subtle acting choices: fiddling with wedding rings, flinching at a touch, drinks poured aggressively, and hair/clothing that become neglected. The backing music gives the scenes a neat little pulse between domestic implosions. On the night I attended, the lighting system was clearly having issues, so I do not feel I can properly comment on Daniel Endicott’s design beyond noting that the red-toned world of the play still gave the room an appropriately heated edge.

I am not exactly the target demographic here: 30, unmarried, and very happy to go home to my cats. But I understand separation. I understand the heartache of being blindsided, and I understand how one person’s “fresh start” can become everyone else's heartbreak. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed it, and the audience around me was completely engaged too as we chuckled, gasped, or sat in astonished silence. I kept looking at my friends for their reactions like we were watching a particularly thrilling reality show. I laughed, winced, sympathised, and judged, often within the same scene. So, I’m not even sure whether to classify it as a comedy or a drama at this point. It feels more like a dinner party where everyone should have just left two wines earlier.

Three Little Words pokes at marriage, friendship, identity, compromise, the quiet resentments people swear they are fine about, and Ad Astra lets us sit right in the awkward, wine-soaked middle of it.