The Waiting Room

Written by Kylie Trounson, The Waiting Room explores the story of her father Emeritus Professor Alan Trounson who, with a team led by Dr Carl Wood, pioneered IVF research and its breakthroughs in Melbourne in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. Combining personal narrative, interviews with key figures in the IVF debate and amusing fictional conversations with ancient Greek gods and philosophers, the work attempts to encapsulate the historical, ethical and personal stories that surround the development of the procedure. One of the work’s strengths is in taking the audience back to the early debates on the ethics of IVF. Trounson successfully captures the excitement and the ethical challenges the procedure presented. Nevertheless, this is a mere fillip. The disparate work is linked by Trounson’s character Kylie (Sophie Ross) clinically announcing plot points and attempting to engage the audience with pseudo-philosophical monologues. The actors try to instill some life into the characters but are restricted by a wooden script that portrays people who are ultimately unlikable. William McInnes does succeed to some degree with his larger than life characters but, like everyone else’s, his heart obviously isn’t in it. While the subject matter is interesting and easy to relate to, on the whole the work is a long and relatively boring night at the theatre.