Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney
April 6, 2018

For an adaptation of a work that saw its writer exiled by Stalin, Eamon Flack’s Sami in Paradise feels curiously unsubversive. Flack (who also directs) has transplanted Nikolai Erdman’s 1928 farce The Suicide from Soviet Russia to a modern day refugee camp, exploring the human foibles of its inhabitants as they try to eke out a life that feels satisfying despite its stasis. It tells the story of Sami, whose decision to commit suicide is hijacked by a bevy of individuals who’d quite like to claim his death for their own pet causes. A premise that holds a great deal of potential, it’s unfortunately never fulfilled in Flack’s adaptation, which fails to carry over Erdman’s humanist vein and attention to character.

Yalin Ozucelik and Paula Arundell. All photos © Clare Hawley

Flack has assembled a game cast of 11, and all bring a lot of energy to proceedings. But the first act, this production’s weakest half, sees nearly all of them deliver at the same relentless high pitch, which wears thin after 20 minutes and leaves a significant amount of dialogue completely unintelligible. Many laugh lines and comic...