Brilliant Lies
by David Williamson
Queensland State Theatre Company
in association with State Theatre Company
Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

David Williamson’s recent work has often seemed like a mixture of Ibsen and Ray Cooney. The ethical and social questions in plays like Top Silk and Money and Friends were constantly being short-circuited by broad comedy and one-liners. Complexity, if any developed, was distrusted by the writer. Besides, it might compromise passenger comfort. Much better to give the folks another joke and detonate everything back into edible atoms. A Williamson play was fast becoming the dramatic equivalent of chicken nuggets.

Brilliant Lies is distinctively Williamson with its high profile subject matter and pacy teledrama narrative. It is also his best writing since Travelling North. In taking on questions about sexual harassment and incest in what is still essentially a comic medium Williamson could stand accused of taking yet another good idea – his plays are always good ideas- and reducing it to opportunism and over-simplification. There is evidence of the latter and it blights the final scene but, all the same, Brilliant Lies is a bold and engaging play.

At a time when the problems of sexual harassment in the workplace are only gradually being taken seriously, a play about a young woman embellishing the facts in order to sue her boss for a substantial compensation might seem like yet another crack of the backlash. But Williamson presents his plot with scrupulous care. The play gives a clear account of general arguments about harassment- the lines given to Marion, the negotiator, make sure of that. It also demonstrates how difficult such matters are to arbitrate. In fact there’s a very good management training video to be made from several of the office scenes.

But David Williamson is writing a play not a social tract and this takes him from the complexity of the office intrigue back into the dysfunctional dynamics of a family – two sisters, a brother and their father, a bankrupt tycoon with a heart condition. Susy, the complainant, is an erstwhile rich kid faced with the banality of office routine, her sister Katy is an out-of-work architect, a lesbian stoic – and the pivot of the play. Paul, the brother is a conservative with christian values and a struggling carpet business. The three unmatched siblings interact frustratedly as loyalties are challenged and confirmed. Susy needs the skeptical Katy to corroborate her damages claim, Paul cajoles his sisters into inviting their father Brian for birthday drinks. It turns out that the old man needs heart surgery which will cost just about the amount that Susy hopes to be paid in compensation. The familiarity and vividness of the character detail is both comic and tenderly achieved. David Williamson has a splendid gift for such writing when he gives himself the room to move.

Director Aubrey Mellor has gathered a strong cast for this production. Miranda Otto gives an intelligently consistent performance as the unlikeably bratty Susy. Rhett Walton, playing Paul, creditably avoids stereotype with some nicely observed shading and Genevieve Lemon is excellent as Katy, relaxed and perceptive and a match for the sheer presence of Ray Barrett’s Brian, a fleshy old crocodile of monstrously comic proportions. Christine Amor is less distinctive as Marion and as the suits, Vince and Gary, Peter Adams and Chris Betts need to lower their boom considerably. Betts as Gary is far too hyper when a quiet menace would suffice- and enhance the ambiguity of the charges against him. Instead all that Pacino finger-snapping works against the sinuous mixture of comedy and edge the play establishes.

Designer Dale Ferguson’s set is serviceable and as adaptable as the open plan office space on which it is based. But less could be made of the scene changes – madly spinning amongst all those synthesiser blasts and licks of light giving us lie detector motifs (or are they angiograms?) Just as David Williamson has gained more by ambling a bit, so might his able director Aubrey Mellor.

Brilliant Lies pulls together elements of intrigue and social comment, public life and private with considerable flair. But after raising uncomfortable truths the final scene has an unwelcome Cosby Show flipness to it. The characters have opened up some serious stuff; we don’t need rubbery quips about families being the dangdest old things just to get to blackout. David Williamson has written one of his best plays for some time by trusting his instincts more. He can also trust his audience by letting some difficult things remain difficult.

The Adelaide Review, No.118, September, 1993, p.33.