The show sold out for most of its two week season although it was only reviewed once. The script received excellent feedback from judges (below) when it was awarded second prize in the 2004 International Student Playscript Competition, run by The World Drama Trust. The script is also under consideration as a spoken word play for BBC Audio.

Comments on People Watching:

Sir Alan Ayckbourn (renowned playwright, credits include Things We Do For Love, Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests) said:
"Lorin Clarke's People Watching is stuffed with interesting ideas about art and life and national (Australian) identity. I was in the main very engrossed. It was genuinely funny at times, too, refusing despite its occasionally quite serious subject matter to take itself too seriously. Nice characterisations and character conflicts and dialogue which positively bounces along."

Stephen Jeffrries (also a playwright, credits include The Libertine, A Going Concern, Like Dolls or Angels) said:
"Clever post-modernist Australian piece which presents an alfresco committee meeting of a young writers' group as seen through the eyes of a mysterious pair of narrators. The debate ranges through many current topics and the characters are well drawn."

Peter Thomson (Professor Emeritus, University of Exeter, author of On Actors & Acting) said:
"I enjoyed People Watching a lot. It looks like a politically alert writer's response to the question: 'Why can't people of this generation write political plays?'
1) what chance is there of (even left-wing) consensus in so globalised a context?
2) an individual writer is hard-pressed to arrive at a consensus in her own head.

So Lorin has spread the arguments in her own head around the different people she's created - and has the arguers fondly observed by two Under Milk Wood voices. It's quite a specialplay, I think, speaking for an (understandably) politically anguished generation.

The Australian government, after all, is led by a man almost as stubbornly brutish as Thatcher was here - and my government is led by a man who seems able at will to convince himself of his own sincerity."