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August 01, 1989

Professional Foul

Top Silk
by David Williamson
Playhouse ·

According to David Williamson, barristers are better value than the Tooth Fairy. There’s nothing that their silky talents can’t achieve. If you are a media tycoon these scriveners can get around the anti~ Trust laws, they can also help out when you get caught with more than a recreational amount of an illegal substance. Then, when they’ve done that, they’ll be your next Premier. That is, if they can be bothered.

In recent years Williamson’s plays have probed academia, football, investigative reporting, old age, even, in Emerald City, his own navel. Now, he has a go at The Law but, unhappily for we admirers of his work, Top Silk is the nearest thing to pure corn. Like some of his other plays of late, Top Silk is a sort of drame a clef. Or, at least, you feel you might be able to guess from the sloshy identikits who the press baron, the radical-turned-Liberal-silvertail, the QC groomed for Labor leadership, and the bent barrister, who makes incriminating evidence disappear, might be.

But none of this flirtation with Real Life lends any verisimilitude to the play. Even a brief account is unpromising. Jane and Trevor are Sydney lawyers. He’s a QC, she earns twenty times less doing legal aid missionary work. Then, who should turn up on a heroin charge but Eddie, Jane’s old school flame from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. With her client facing a long mandatory term in gaol (he has a wife, four kids and makes lovely furniture), Jane secretly spends $20,000 of her own (and Trev’s) sovereigns to pay for a large amount of the white powder in Exhibit A to go missing.

This creative approach to jurisprudence is intercepted by old university chum, Tony Turner MP, Liberal arch-enemy to Trevor’s Labor safe-seat and leadership intentions. Tony leans on Trevor to pull out of political contention or he will Tell All. You will never guess what tacky little counter-play Jane comes up with for that one. Meanwhile beastly Paul Bradley, dirty digger media owner, has offered Trevor large sums to help get around those pesky broadcasting ownership restrictions and in return he will make him – you guessed it – Premier.

Silly Jane. It all sounds a bit like A Doll’s House. These women who don’t know the ways of the law the way Men do. All this trub for Trevor just because Jane is feeling contrite for being snobby towards Eddie and his Lawrentian lifeforce back when Helen Shapiro was a girl. And there’s more. Ructions begin in the family circle as Jane and Trevor start having maritals, while son Mark, unable to please his Dad with his HSC, finds he has begun a collision course in teenage alienation. Actually, these scenes are some of the best in the play with Simon Kay giving a good account of under-age angst.

In the leads, Tina Bursill (Jane) and Geoff Morrell (Trevor) are valiant, even though the playwright has deprived them of anything resembling motivation. Why Jane would risk trying to bribe the cops is fatuously unclear and why Trevor would even consider representing Bradley, or the luckless Eddie, is equally unfathomable. It is not hard to believe, however, why son Mark wouldn’t want to live with either of these dingbats.

Tina Bursill looked frankly uncomfortable in many of her scenes, particularly those with Patrick Ward as Eddie. Not even a lawyer in love ever talked like that in the Long Bay remand section. Morrell, a conscientious actor, poured everything into the empty vessel that is Trevor. Unfortunately, all it produced was Dagwood Bumstead, or one of those harassed husbands from a sixties sitcom.

There have been some changes from the original Sydney production. Patrick Ward as Eddie and Lewis Fitz~ Gerald as Turner are new, but I cannot say improvements, on Vince Martin and John Howard. John Clayton is powerfully taciturn as the crook brief, but, overall, it is not within these, or any actors’ power to pull the threads of Top Silk together.

Director Graeme Blundell has taken over from Rodney Fisher and while the show is crisper than when I saw it in Sydney in January and Blundell has players making fewer exits through trapdoors, Shaun Gurton’s design, with large back-projection screens throwing up sub-Warhol graphics and giant mug shots of the players, remains an arty distraction from the unavoidable fact that Top Silk is a screenplay looking for a telemovie.

David Williamson has always had a gift for dialogue and the rhythms of Australian colloquial speech and there are enough rent-a-joke one-liners to amuse. But that cannot disguise the fact that the play strains credibility at every turn and trivialises its subject. There’s something arch about its wit and, unlike Williamson’s vividly-drawn early work, Top Silk has no convincing location in the world. In these guns ‘n’ lawyers post-Fitzgerald days it all seems impossibly quaint. David Williamson himself has encouraged us to expect more.

“Professional Foul” The Adelaide Review, No.66, August, 1989, p.38.

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