Stale Cake. Libra Theatre Café.

It is difficult to decipher the tone that writer and director Gabrielle Hofmann aims for in her 45-minute ensemble piece, Stale Cake. The show blurb describes it as having the “dark wit of a sitcom”, which feels odd because the characters are not quirky enough to fit the genre, and the humour is often unintended. Perhaps a tongue-in-cheek take on steamy melodrama fits better, though there is so much florid sexual tension in the piece that it is hard to tell whose tongue will end up in whose cheek.

Former and current university housemates are gathering to mark a year since the death of their erstwhile friend and roomie, Jake, in a car crash. “Squashed like a bug”, the drunk and soon-to-be-drunker Archie (Dennis Msatida) tells us matter-of-factly, suggesting he might no longer be as grief-stricken as he claims. Archie is making suggestive, lingering eyes at Noah (Habil Yaldaz), though it may be the booze. Noah, who tells us he “felt seen” by Jake, is grieving the departed’s nocturnal visits to his room, where they lay next to each other and chatted long into the night – all entirely innocent, Noah claims, though one struggles to credit it.

Meanwhile, Jake’s former girlfriend, Olivia (Tara Korda Kolar), still grieves her loss. “I feel like the black widow without the murdering,” she tells us, which begs a few questions to which we do not get answers. On the plus side, she still has the hots for Thomas (Gruff Gwyn), with whom she was having an affair when Jake died. Thomas spills wine over her. “It’s not the first time I’ve been wet around you,” Olivia confides huskily, much to the chagrin of Thomas’s new girlfriend, Daisy (Alice Barker), who has misunderstood the meaning of ‘anniversary’ and brought a birthday cake by mistake.

Revelations ensue, events spiral, and neither the birthday cake nor any hint of narrative throughline will survive the evening. One feels writer Hofmann may have a future writing pacey bonkbuster novels, or storylining a sexed-up Bridgerton.

Writer and Director:    Gabrielle Hofmann