The Ruby Sunrise

The Ruby Sunrise is the second American play at the Ensemble in recent months to address the way fiction betrays the truth when there are powerful interests at stake. And like The Little Dog Laughed, it's a funny and well written satire of the mass media.

In a barnyard in Indiana in 1927, a bright spark of a girl, Ruby (Matilda Ridgeway), invents the cathode ray tube. She has learned what she knows of electronics and physics from her father, but is now reduced to living with her alcoholic Aunt Lois (Amanda Muggleton). Lois has a boarder, a "likeable college kid" called Henry (Jonathan Prescott) who loves Ruby, but both he and Lois look at the girl, with her talk of pictures transmitted into people's homes, like she's some kind of a crazy person.

"Tele-vision", Ruby predicts, "is gonna make a whole new world," uniting the human race because we'll be able to see the faces of people we might be tempted to make war on. "Who would want to see war right in their own living room?" she rhapsodises.

The ironies pile up pretty quickly when the action moves to a New York television studio in 1952. It's the golden age of live TV, but also the belle époque of persecution and paranoia. An ambitious young script coordinator, Lulu (Catherine McGraffin), may be onto something when she advocates to her boss (Paul Gleeson) that TV dramas should be about the struggles and hopes of "the little guy", but she'd better watch out that she's not branded a communist.

Lulu knows all the facts about Ruby's story and thinks that talented screenwriter Tad Rose (Glenn Hazeldine) is just the guy to write it. But when television shows are "all just extended sales pitches for the sponsor", can they be trusted to tell even TV's own origin story with honour and verisimilitude?

There are Stoppardian boxes-within-boxes in Rinne Groff's clever 2005 play that explores the oppression of brilliant women and the failure of mass communication to improve the world. Claire Moloney's economic set design effectively opens up the cramped Ensemble stage space and performances are strong, ranging from impassioned and nuanced (Ridgeway's Ruby) to broadly comic (Hollie Andrew as the blonde ditz who plays Ruby on the small screen). The production is thoughtful, entertaining, and the 100th play directed by Sandra Bates in her 23 years as artistic director of the Ensemble Theatre. It's one of which she can be proud. Nick Dent

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