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2000

Pluto Productions

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I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

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Play/Drama

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Have you ever wondered what kind of person would want to be a ventriloquist? Chris Kirby did -but then he was one al-ready. This one-man show, written under his real name, Chris Covington, is the intriguing result of his soul-searching. It's also an imaginative bid to rejuvenate this venerable craft by injecting it with a surreal strain of psychological drama. Graham "Lips" Buchanan is a man with a bizarre, traumatic past. His mother being married elsewhere, he is brought up by his father - "a very famous transvestite ventriloquist" -who trains him in the art by the simple device of keeping his mouth shut - literally. Told that the price of future fame is a pact with the Devil that forbids him forming human relationships, Lips. invents an imaginary friend, who turns out to hate him. it's a short step to believing his dummies are real (one is his agent, another his lover) and hearing the voices that finally drive him to his tragic end. Which is where we come in. At the start, Kirby wanders onto the stage as Lips, seemingly baffled to see us. A twinidy, beaming, grey-haired Australian, he is slyly knowing about his character's appareiit artlessness, throws in a few genuinely funny gags and soon has the audience hanging on his every word. It transpires that we're all in limbo, killed in a pile-up that Lips caused in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel; and from there on, it's down, deep down, into Ups's inner demons.
Nigel Cliff, The Times