Perfect Arrangement - New Theatre

Perfect Arrangement

The New Theatre

“Perfect Arrangement”, written by Topher Payne in 2014 and set in 1950s America, is a play that looks backwards in order to ask contemporary questions. This production, directed and designed by Patrick Kennedy at the New Theatre, leans into that tension between period polish and present-day unease, delivering a thoughtful and well-crafted staging within the realities of community theatre.

Kennedy’s direction foregrounds restraint. The play opens in the familiar idiom of mid-century domestic comedy: neighbourly dinners, clipped pleasantries, and carefully managed social rituals. The audience is invited into a world of apparent order and ease. Yet beneath this composure lie marriages built on concealment, and lives shaped by fear of exposure. Kennedy allows this tension to accumulate gradually, resisting melodrama in favour of slow, accumulating pressure. The result is a production that trusts both its material and its audience.

Design plays a particularly important role in articulating the production’s ideas. Also designed by Kennedy, the set is an ingenious response to budgetary constraints. Within the limitations of a community theatre context, it looks assured and purposeful. The domestic stylised box set - neat, symmetrical, and reassuringly ‘correct’ - subtly shifts during the action, moving downstage as the play progresses. This simple but effective mechanic does more than solve spatial challenges: it becomes a conceptual gesture, reminding us that although the story is set in the past, its implications are uncomfortably close. The world of enforced conformity presses toward us, refusing to remain safely historical.

Lighting design is clean and economical, supporting the action without drawing attention to itself. Sound is similarly unobtrusive, but for those attuned to it, a ticking clock underscores the action. Barely noticeable at first, it grows in significance as the stakes rise, becoming a quiet but insistent reminder of time running out - not only for the characters’ arrangements, but for the fragile equilibrium they are struggling to maintain.

Amongst the actors, Brock Crammond stands out as Jim Baxter, delivering a performance of particular clarity and specificity. He fully embodies the character’s internal conflict, capturing both the warmth of Jim’s affections and the rigidity imposed by social expectation. His work grounds the play emotionally, offering a sense of what is at risk beneath the surface civility.

Patrick Kennedy is a director whose work I greatly admire, particularly with his own company, Patrick Kennedy Theatre Machine, where his productions often pulse with urgency and theatrical vim. This production does not quite reach the same level of kinetic intensity, but that feels less a failure than a consequence of the material itself. “Perfect Arrangement” is a quieter, more mannered play, and Kennedy approaches it with appropriate care. It is an interesting and worthwhile work to have seen, especially in the context of ongoing conversations about visibility, safety, and the cost of assimilation.

Though written in 2014, the play’s examination of private compromise and public performance resonates today. Kennedy’s production does not overstate these parallels, but allows them to emerge naturally, through design, pacing, and performance. What lingers is not outrage, but recognition - and the unsettling sense that the distance between then and now is far narrower than we might like to believe.

Review by Kate Gaul

Image: Bob Seary