Love’s triumph

This is a mad camp melodrama set on the crooked side of Sydney.

With an unlikely plot about mistaken identity, misplaced twins and the final triumph of love and honour, Love’s Triumph borrows much from the comedies of Shakespeare. Indeed, these love birds and others crawling from Sydney’s underbelly even speak to us in iambic pentameter.

Terence Crawford artfully makes verse out of Australian slang and obscenity so that his Kings Cross world echoes some of the charm of C J Dennis’s The Sentimental Bloke and a touch of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. This winning innocence, however, is tempered with the bawdy language of a drag queen on a rough night at the Imperial.

Dominating Love’s Triumph is a well-padded and painted Gary Scale as the ruthless crime queen Edwina Brumble. She begins the day organising concrete shoes for a failed punter. By the end she’s lost her best whore to love, her daughter to a country bumpkin and $50,000 on a nag at Randwick called Love’s Triumph.

Even worse she’s broken her iron rule and her cold heart now flutters for a new love. What’s more, he’s a crooked cop.

This show returns to Sydney, with much the same team, after a successful premiere in 2003. It’s engaging, riotous entertainment with a big heart for Sydney’s colour and geography and of course the sentiment of love. There are occasional dull plot moments, some still-amateur stagecraft and the cast has varying success in confidently relishing the verse. But the melodramatic pace and excess of this production sweep aside all reservation.

Director Brendon McDonall makes sure his cast sings from the same over-active song sheet. Matching Scale’s hilarious performance is Mark Owen-Taylor as Hoover J. Idiott, a hypo-active evangelist preacher who slips into drag and discovers his female side. Megan Drury is also sassy as Hoover’s country sidekick, Baby Idiott, just as she is convincingly sweet as Edwina’s daughter, Chastity (and with a good tongue for the verse).

James Browne’s burlesque costumes and his moveable cut-out of a cartoon 1950s Sydney deserve their own applause.

It takes a Shakespearean age for all the plot lines to be resolved -“ for the twins to discover themselves and find the right dad, for the cash to be returned to the most deserving and for all revengeful thoughts to be vanquished. But it’s a fond and inventive ride and you won’t be looking at your watch.

Love’s Triumph is at the Darlinghurst Theatre until 22 April.