It’s not an Agatha Christie year for Tempo Theatre – it’s time for a good laugh instead, reports arts editor HELEN MUSA. 

A good laugh is how director Jon Elphick sees it, as he explains how the venerable community theatre group Tempo alternates its most popular repertoire choices year by year.

In 2023, for instance, Tempo scored a hit with Basil Thomas’ 1950s British comedy of manners, Book of the Month and now, turning again to a Thomas script, they’re staging the play, LoveBirds.

“We like a bit of comedy,” Elphick says. “Tempo has found a great way to forget all our troubles for a couple of hours.”

He’s singing from exactly the same song sheet as Lachlan Houen, who’s been directing Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit over at Canberra Rep, a play with one uncanny resemblance to LoveBirds. 

Yes, there’s a ghostly spirit in it. 

Newly married couple Julie (Eloise Willis) and Bertie (Bradley Jones) are given a budgie as a wedding present, but it turns out that the bird is possessed by the spirit of Julie’s late first husband, Cecil, who wants to make trouble for them, not unlike the ghostly Elvira in Blithe Spirit.

The big question is whether the previously happy couple will be able to rid the budgie of Cecil’s malevolent spirit. 

Without committing too many spoilers, Elphick has a few of the answers, although our conversation on the phone is, disturbingly, interrupted by some eloquent tweeting – yes, there’s a real-life budgie in the background, but not the one that’s going to appear on stage, which will be voiced by George Belibassakis.

The budgerigar is actually a native Australian bird, but that fact doesn’t feature in this silly play, which suggests that it’s South American.

As you’d expect in a comedy, there’s a lot of extraneous fun. 

For instance, Julie and Bertie have both been married before and both have lost their spouses in strange circumstances – Cecil having fallen into a steam funnel at Hampton Court and Bertie’s late wife having been a trapeze artist who missed the net, all more or less irrelevant, but it adds to the fun. 

The couple are just back from their honeymoon and they plan to move in with Julie’s parents when eccentric Aunt Dollie (Marian FitzGerald) delivers them the budgerigar as a wedding present.

Here the plot is even more like that of Blithe Spirit. After Cecil starts to create trouble they try to get rid of the budgie, but it is found and returned to the house by a Russian international student Natasha (Eilis French).

Then, after Bertie chats to an American sailor in a pub, he gets the idea of trying to exorcise the budgie by using an onion, mixed herbs and a limp stick of rhubarb. 

That works a treat, but the plot takes a twist when Professor Gaston Cheval turns up wanting to buy the budgie because it possesses a transmigratory soul, so they try to work out how to put the spirit back into the budgie. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, it can be dodgy working with birds and in a 1961 London production, Elphick has discovered, the budgie got away in Act II and the show was brought to a standstill until it was back safely behind bars.

The cast, he reports, are having a great deal of fun working on their first big production for the year. 

Right now, they’re looking out for new talent for their next show in October-November.

“We’re keen to find a director to put their hands up and come play with us,” Elphick says.

LoveBirds, Belconnen Community Theatre, May 30-June 7.