Money and Friends
David Williamson
State Theatre Company presents
RQTC, Queensland’s State Theatre Company
Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There is an increasingly widespread perception that David Williamson is a man more sinned against than sinning, that after more than twenty years he has not been embraced for the plays he has given us and the institution he has become. He is presented as our loftiest poppy, a Gulliver of the theatre constantly needled by Lilliputian envy and peevishness.

This view even comes from the playwright himself who despite enormous recognition, financial success and his dominance of the Australian mainstage still manages to see himself as the underdog. In an unprecedented move to turn what he saw as an unfavourable tide he recently wrote to reviewers suggesting, more or less, that they give him a fair go. In his director’s note for Money and Friends Aubrey Mellor also takes a pre-emptive stance comparing Williamson to Chekhov who too was “rebuked for not writing party-line, for not being didactic.” “It is high time,” he adds crustily, that “his contribution to this country is analysed and applauded.”

A writer as prolific as David Williamson is bound to miss the goalposts now and then -in a twenty year span even Ibsen got the doldrums- so it is hard to know what Williamson the working playwright or his analytic admirers can expect. He certainly has laurels enough to rest on. Williamson has written a swag of good plays and some -The Removalists, Don’s Party, The Club – are classics. Others- Emerald City and Top Silk- are pot-boilers. That is hardly surprising surely ? The difficulty comes when no-one is allowed to tell the Emperor he’s wearing persiflage.

Money and Friends is a Williamson play. That means -always- that it is based on a good idea and is written with wit and flair. But what makes it characteristic of much of Williamson’s work, and much of his recent work, is that the idea and the one-liners don’t carry the day. This has nothing to do with his life, whether he can see Sydney Harbour from his house or whether he goes to dinner parties with millionaires or anything else said to be the crucial indicators that he has been spoilt or has sold out. This is entirely to do with his imagination and what he does with it, with the themes and conventions he chooses and what he does with them.

And the answer in Money and Friends is – not enough. If David Williamson was Ray Cooney writing Run For Your Wife or if he was producing Channel Seven sitcoms it might be enough. But he’s not. More is presumed of him -and more is promised. When his director and those writing program notes mention him in the same breath as Moliere and Chekhov then it’s much more difficult for the playwright to complain that our expectations are inflated and inappropriate.

Besides, Williamson’s plays are about large and central issues. That’s what makes him interesting. His observations have always been those of diagnostician and moralist. His characters invariably face ethical choices complicated by circumstance, lack of courage, self interest, the twangs of the heart -or, most often, loyalty to some strong but unformulated creed. If we take Williamson seriously, and therefore his deficiencies seriously, it is because he requires it. He can hardly persuade us his plays are really bits of fluff when patently they’re not. And he can hardly be surprised if there are occasional objections when he takes a serious issue and reduces it to a bit of fluff. And by serious I don’t mean solemn. I mean serious the way Moliere is, or Patrick Cook or John Clarke.

Money and Friends is about the fragile etiquette of social climbing and the not very discreet charm of the new rich. The central characters are exempt though – they are academics flush enough to own beach shacks but vulnerable to market fluctuation. Peter, recently a widower, has gone guarantor for his brother and the venture has gone bung. Sounds like Peter is a gone goose to me but there is a counter-suit pending- for wrong advice from the bank. Now, there’s a real laugh. Anyway, his lawyers may save the day but that’s going to cost forty g’s. If he wins he’ll get his costs, if not he’s completely down the toilet. Only Margaret, historian and A.S. Byatt devotee, is in on the dark secret. She’s a mate and wants to help. But Peter is firm -you don’t borrow from friends. The trouble for the plausibility of the plot is that he’s absolutely right. Besides, the other people we meet in the play are not his friends, they are his neighbours at the upwardly mobile coastal retreat, Crystal Inlet – and they’re the typical mixed bag of unlikely acquaintances that neighbours usually are.

Williamson wheels them in one by one – the crass TV ecologist, the crass lawyer with his crass spouse the social lionness, the crass orthopedic surgeon and his nice wife, and the crass young honours student who turns out not only to be Margaret’s bit of crumpet but the son of the TV ecologist as well. There is a lot of smart dialogue and despite the awkwardness of making Margaret the narrator, the first ten minutes between her and Peter are very funny – brittle Wiliamson dialogue about the professional class he knows best. Beyond that it is Albee and the Bickersons – humiliate the host, get the guest and (maybe) hump the hostess. Like the adultery jokes, the jokes about money are easy. Alex, the greedy lawyer can’t lend Peter ten thousand because it means selling his fifty-two foot boat – so everybody in the audience with a thirty foot boat can have a good laugh. The details are close but not sharp, the milieu is recognisable but not vivid. The characters are neither precise nor strong satiric stereotypes.

Moving from deck to deck in designer Dale Ferguson’s dubiously stylised rainforest the actors struggle with their task. As Margaret and Peter, Robyn Nevin and John Gaden give the production the best of their urbanity – they are outstandingly skilled, affectionate performances but the satire is too complacent and the style of the other roles too discrepant. Brandon Burke and Sally McKenzie, legal piranha and wife, get increasingly shrill, Peter Carroll, the sawbones Stephen, almost clears the hurdle as a cross between Eeyore and the Imaginary Invalid while Don Barker and Caroline Kennison have only obvious comedy as the eco-egotist and his disappointed bride. As Justin, the hunk from Sydney, Paul Bishop experiments widely without success.

Director Aubrey Mellor, admirer and afficionado of Chekhov and Moliere, has chosen to mix them in a style that is neither naturalistic nor pungently generalised. Money and Friends is too cosy in its perspective and insubstantial in its structure to carry such intentions. The result is a play that will please audiences who like a few bonk jokes, some local colour and a painless night in the theatre. This production is all of that- and again, because it is David Williamson, it is a pity it’s not more.
The Adelaide Review, No. 103 June, 1992, pp.35-6.