September 15th 2026
Review by Alan Connor
Talking Heads – W Theatre, Woollahra Library, Double Bay
There is something quietly perfect about watching Alan Bennett performed in a library. A crowd settles on the stairs at Woollahra Library in Double Bay to see W Theatre’s adaptation of Talking Heads – coats still on, with the air of people who have been let in after closing time and are rather pleased about it.
Bennett needs no introduction. Six decades of razor-sharp, acerbic wit aimed squarely at the British class system, delivered like he’s offering you a biscuit. He began his career in the early sixties alongside Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, later gave us The History Boys and The Madness of King George, picking up Oliviers, BAFTAs and Tonys with the enthusiasm of a man queuing at the post office. Somewhere in between he wrote Talking Heads: his celebrated television and stage monologue series so spare they look effortless, and widely considered his masterpiece.
This is the play’s Sydney debut, staged as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival in what may be my favourite library in the city. Vines trail from the ceiling. The audience arranges itself on the stairs above shelves of large print, bestsellers and children’s titles – most of which will be picked over, flicked through and dog-eared by the Double Bay residents in the days to come. A musician murmurs in the corner before the play starts, drifting between steel drum and steel guitar, atmospheric and faintly melancholic, the sound of something about to go wrong.
Two actors take it in turns, under the direction of Diana Volpe. Fiona Gordon has been acting for over thirty years across theatre, television and radio, trained at Manchester School of Theatre, and has worked with Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Sir Peter Gill, Orlando Arocha and Lawrence Till. She also founded W Theatre, in the neighbourhood she calls home. Sophie Dillman has worked across television, film and theatre, and is best known for her Logie-nominated work in Home and Away, and has starred in W Theatre’s sold-out London production.
Gordon goes first as Rosemary: house-proud and green-thumbed, the sort of woman whose living room curtains you can see twitching as she keeps an eye on the street the way other people keep a diary. She has something to get off her chest, and she gets to it by degrees, the way ordinary people do – the flowerbeds, the husband, and then, almost as an afterthought, a man lying dead on the carpet. Ten minutes and the room belongs to her. The two actors alternate between two monologues throughout the night, and Dillman arrives on the library floor next playing the role of Lesley: underemployed, undeterred, and utterly convinced that a low-budget film for the West German market is the break she’s been waiting for. She is wrong, magnificently, and she never once notices.
By the end we have had a dead husband, a fetish quietly accounted for, and an actress talked out of her clothes and into her big break. Bennett’s gift is that none of it arrives as scandal; it arrives as small talk. Two performers, no set to speak of, and a room full of people silently engrossed on a chilly Tuesday night.
Both actors are excellent, the sound carried perfectly so we didn’t miss a word, and the whole thing runs an hour with no interval, which was the perfect amount of time. At the end of the night, we waited as the librarian pulled up the shutters and we all went home, which seemed the right way to end an hour of listening in on other people’s lives.
W Theatre describes itself as a “professional theatre rooted in community.” On this showing, the Woollahra branch has arrived the way Bennett’s characters do – politely, and with more going on than they let on. I’m very keen to see what they do next.
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