Gasp!

Gasp! is Ben Elton’s darkly comic satire and critically acclaimed first play which debuted in 1990 starring Hugh Laurie and became a triumph on the London stage.

Now it has been re-imagined by Elton for another country and for the 21st century and comes to the Brisbane stage as a collaboration between QTC and Perth’s renowned Black Swan Theatre Company.

In this new incarnation Gasp! Is located in an Australia that has become drunk on a dizzying resources boom, in which too much money is never enough.
Lockheart Enterprises subscribes to this mantra and concocts a genius plan to privatize the air that we breathe, with their ‘Suck and Blow’ filtering machine an instant hit and the planet finding itself divided into the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, with air another commodity at the mercy of market forces To not pay is to not breathe.

Infused with the sharp and brilliant biting wit of Elton, one of the world’s leading comics, this play is a side-splitting black satire on the heartlessness of big business and the ruthlessness of advertising that is as relevant today as when Gasp! was first written.

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