About the show

“You can always find something new, if you look hard enough – something fresh.”

This is exactly what Monash Uni Student Theatre has done with the adaptation of revered comic author P.G. Wodehouse’s novel of the same name, Something Fresh, coming up in September.

Dubbed “the funniest writer ever to put words on paper” by Hugh Laurie, as well as influencing Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams, A.A. Milne, Evelyn Waugh and countless other comedians and authors, P.G. Wodehouse was known for two things: the first, being a suspiciously genial prisoner of the Germans in WWII (he was happy as long as they kept him “supplied with pens, tobacco and chocolate”), and the second, his amiable comic universe.

Representing two first-times for MUST, Something Fresh, published in 1915, has never before been adapted for the stage, a task which has now been undertaken with care and finesse by these people:

Jem Splitter (right, mostly) and Will Athanasakis (left), first time playwrights and Monash students. They look the capable sort, no? A pair of trustworthy faces? Let’s say they do.

Adapted from the first in Wodehouse’s famous Blandings series, Something Fresh is the story of Ashe Marson and Joan Valentine, two bored London novelists who find themselves suddenly disguised as servants in the enormous Blandings Castle, where the laws of the below-stairs staff are more rigid and arbitrary than anywhere else in the world, to steal back a priceless collectible from the “nice old Earl” who accidentally stole it in the first place. What started as friendship turns to competition as they are pitted against not only each other, but also the threat of indiscriminate gunshots and public rebukes from the Head Butler, as they chase the hefty cash prize.

Something Fresh is energetically, good-naturedly funny, and stunningly “fresh” even nearly a century after the novel’s first publication. Indeed, proving himself to be somewhat ahead of his time, Wodehouse creates a dynamic, powerful female presence in the character of Joan Valentine, who refuses to play second fiddle in just another romantic comedy.

With a cast of twenty and an experienced, dynamic creative team under the direction of Jem Splitter, the show is unabashedly, unapologetically light-hearted: a joy, nothing less.