Canberra Critics Circle: The Almighty Sometimes

Friday, November 21, 2025

The Almighty Sometimes

The Almighty Sometimes by Kendall Feaver. Off the Ledge Theatre co-presented by The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, 19-22 November 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Nov 20

Cast and Creative Team

Anna – Winsome Ogilvie
Renee – Elaine Noon
Oliver – Robert Kjellgren
Vivienne – Steph Roberts

Director/Lighting Designer – Lachlan Houen
Stage Manager – Lucy van Dooren
Set/Costume Designer – Caitlin Baker
Sound Designer/Composer – Marlene Radice
Movement Director – Kristy Griffin
Costuming & Marketing Assistant – Liv Boddington

Theatre off the ledge is exactly the right way of thinking about this remarkable production of The Almighty Sometimes. Winsome Ogilvie enacts Anna’s continuous likelihood of emotional collapse in such detail in action, voice and expression of her feelings that one is amazed at her capacity and flexibility as an actor – while also feeling so sorry for Anna caught in the impossible confusion of her mother’s doing everything “right” and maybe even more than might be expected, for her child’s benefit.

Now, legally an adult, what will become of Anna? What was was her “illness” in the first place. Something we call ADHD I suspect. As a young child she became an irrepressible story writer, but after her encouraging father died, her mother sought help to, essentially, calm her down and have treatment so that Anna’s obvious intelligence could be directed into her education. As a teacher herself, this seemed sensible to Renee.

To quote Off the Ledge Theatre: Winner of the Judges’ Award in the prestigious Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting (UK) and the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Prizes for Drama, Kendall Feaver’s captivating play is a profound and compelling study of a young woman trying to discover where her illness ends and her identity begins.

As a teacher myself, I wondered if the issue of classifying some behaviours as illnesses, justifying drug treatments as the psychiatrist Vivienne – played very straight by Steph Roberts – does, was from the author’s personal experience.

A fascinating interview in The Saturday Paper in 2020 (at https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/theatre/2020/11/28/playwright-kendall-feaver/160648200010780) doesn’t reveal the answer, but the importance of the play being presented – which I am sure The Q recognises – is that Anne’s experience, through to what seems to be no more than an isolated life in a ‘home’ from the age of 20, is that it makes a medical/political issue become real. Made worse by how her blunt behaviour has ruined her possible relationship with old school friend Oliver.

Presenting The Almighty Sometimes is a valuable community contribution by the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre and Off The Ledge Theatre to the Australian Capital region. Canberra has often led new developments in education. With the expansion of social media on the internet, parent, teacher and children relationships are changing, and creating new and fraught issues, with attempts at control by banning phones in the classroom and even at school at all, and limiting social media accounts to over 16s.

I hope that this production’s short run can be followed by presentation on tour, hopefully with a secondary school program component.

Establishing one’s identity, always the central concern for teenagers, is what this play is about, and it should not be missed. I have my own memories as a 7-year-old boy who wrote poetry, and how I was treated - though long before modern psychiatry, no-one thought to class me as ill. I got my own back when I got into Uni - the only one in my all boys' school class to choose to answer the poetry question. So there!