EUREKA DAY
EUREKA DAY, Seymour Centre and Outhouse Theatre, 29 May - 21 June 2025. Photography by Richard Farland
Playwright Jonathan Spector got the bug to write Eureka Day way back in 2014. A measles outbreak in California highlighted the downside of the state’s laid-back vaccination policy, which gave citizens a “personal belief exemption”. If you said “I don’t believe in vaccinations”, that was that – no compulsion to get your kid immunised.
In 2018-2019, when the play is set, conspiracy theories and alternate facts were becoming quite the thing, while science was suddenly not. "Balance" in news reporting was achieved by presenting scientific facts alongside crackpot ideas, and the world went to hell in a handcart from which it has yet to return.
And so we join the parents on the Executive Committee of Eureka Day private primary school at the beginning of the school year. Painfully earnest, Rumi-quoting Don (Jamie Oxenbould) welcomes his colleagues, the alpha mansplainer Eli (Christian Charisiou), obsessive knitter and Eli’s adulterous paramour May (Deborah An), and long-standing matron of the group, Suzanne (Katrina Retallick). She is quietly satisfied in their new member Carina (Branden Christine), although she doesn’t realise her beaming gratification is because Carina is the group’s first black member.
The meeting begins with the usual niceties: platitudes, homilies, excessively thoughtful choices of words and topics, much tiptoeing on eggshells to avoid giving offence, and homemade scones. When not dead=set on personal empowerment, each unconsciously or surreptitiously seeks to undermine or one-up the others. It’s a delightfully wicked portrayal of chronically helpful members of the community in their natural environment.
Nevertheless, as so often happens, it doesn’t take long for things to go pear-shaped. The catalyst is a letter from the Health Department announcing a case of mumps in the school, and a directive to ensure all kids are vaccinated and to quarantine until further notice. The 2018 version of a Zoom meeting is called by Don, and with the participation of the wider parents population via a projected screen of their real-time messaging, a lengthy scene of total anarchy breaks out. If there was ever a more insanely frustrating and funny PTA meeting, it has yet to be written.
With a localised but vociferous culture war in full swing, director Craig Baldwin maintains a careful and successful balance between the comedy, politics and social concerns roiling around Eureka Day. The company of five is consistently on fire, when not merely seething, with Retallick and Oxenbould brilliantly immersed in their irritatingly authentic characters.
The set, by Kate Beere, of the colourful upscale school library, briefly and neatly turned into a hospital waiting area, is clever and to the point, enabling some comic business with stacking chairs and kiddy chairs as well as accommodating the ill-fated and hilarious online meeting. Lighting and video design by Aron Murray is equally fine, and between them, Beere and Murray spectacularly transform the black box space.
What happens, as mumps and the MMR vaccine war rages on beyond the school and in the room, is less overtly funny and more thought-provoking. It serves to remind us what it was like when misinformation and a pandemic raged simultaneously, and for the first time. As Australia heads into winter and is warned of a new Covid strain, the laughs begin to feel a bit uneasy, even as the committee members reach the ends of their various tethers, for equally various reasons.
Eureka Day is a cleverly wrought, as well as unexpectedly funny and serious play. This production is pretty damn fine in all aspects and delivers 110 minutes of richly rewarding entertainment. And the very last line – delivered with lugubrious sincerity by Jamie Oxenbould – is one of the best ever. Recommended without reservation.
