The play has just one female actor, who is on stage for an unbroken 85 minutes.

As well as playing the middle-aged woman, Angela, who talks about her relationships with the husband who wanted the divorce so that he could marry the much younger female he was having an affair with, she gets to step briefly into the roles of around 20 other people in her life.

They include her aged mother and grown-up daughter, a surly solicitor, a sex shop worker, and some of the men she meets and dates on a holiday and in the town where she lives.

Australian theatre company HIT Productions is touring a production of My Brilliant Divorce around the nation, with actor Mandi Lodge and director Denny Lawrence, who put together another popular touring one-woman show, Shirley Valentine, again involved.

My Brilliant Divorce will have a performance at Cessnock Performing Arts Centre on Tuesday, August 27, at 8pm.

The show has attracted large audiences, with the staging team pointing out that one in three Australian marriages end in divorce.

Lodge thinks that a lot of people relate to it because they have either been divorced or they know somebody that is divorced.

"They know that these people can be lonely," she said.

"They're back in 'singledom', they have to start dating again and sort of venturing out on their own and eating out at restaurants alone."

Angela's husband of many years (who has the nickname Roundhead) discloses to her that he has a Mexican lover "Mona the Poser".

Angela's adult daughter tells her that she was the only person who didn't know about the affair, which has been going on long-term.

Alone, after the divorce, with only family dog Axal for company (and Axal is a delightful full-size "real" dog), Angela mourns her marriage and learns how to live without her family.

Sometimes very depressed and ringing the local help line, other times resolute and upbeat, she goes on holiday solo, rediscovers sex (and sex shops!), goes on a longer holiday, and meets someone she is attracted to.

The play looks at themes such as late in life divorce, middle-aged loneliness, how a person functions once children have left the nest, life experiences and how to cope when the world you have built comes crashing down.

As you may have realised, the show has sexual themes that make it most suitable for ages 15-plus.

Tickets for the show are $45, concession $40, and CPAC Member $35. Bookings: 4993 4266.

THIS has been a good year for musicals in Newcastle, and Beauty and the Beast further confirms that through the audience response, with some musical numbers receiving cheers, as well as loud applause.

It is a very elegant looking show, with the sets and costumes having a beautiful fairy tale look in keeping with the nature of the story and the movements of the performers bringing out the very different types of characters and how they eventually are able to connect.

The title's Beauty, the relatively quiet Belle (Rachel Davies) who tries to live a secluded, book-reading life, initially seems to be very different to the prince (Danny Folpp) who has been changed into a horned and fur-bodied Beast by a witch he has offended.

However, their similarities gradually come out after she has become a captive in his castle.

And Gaston (Andrew Black), the handsome but self-centred man who sees himself as the right husband for Belle, doesn't have the literal magic of the prince's servants who have been turned into live furniture such as a clock and a wardrobe by the witch.

Their nature comes out very amusingly in the song Be Our Guest when they welcome Belle to the castle, moving about like the implements, including knives and forks, that they have become.

THIS interesting double bill of short plays engagingly showed how stories that have little movement can grip watchers.

The first work, Love Magic, intriguingly was adapted from a short mime written by the Greek playwright Theocritus some 2300 years ago.

It has a girl who has been dumped by the boy she was having a romance with trying to work out how to get him back or how to punish him.

There was a lot of emotion in the 12-minute work that was translated and directed by Michael Ewans, and delivered by actress Siobhan Caulfield.

The play showed just how little has changed in male-female relations over the centuries.

Behind the Wire, by Carl Caulfield, who co-directed with wife Felicity Biggins, had a doctor (Khalil Khay) who had tried to escape from Iran on a boat crowded with refugees, being questioned by a stern Australian defence official (Dez Robertson), after he and his wife and son left their lsland detention centre for a day to go to a wedding.

The detention centre manager (Michael Byrne) tried to help the doctor, with the official's assistant (Eily Fleming) demanding that he stop interfering.

The 25-minute work made it clear how little concern many officials have for the traumas faced by refugees.