Sod ‘Em and Tomorrow
Pat Wilson and Adrian Barnes
Lion Theatre

Pat Wilson and Adrian Barnes have a heap of music and stage credits between them. Not only has Pat Wilson performed and recorded her own songs but she is in demand as a musical director and voice and piano teacher. English born, Adrian Barnes has clocked up extensive flying hours in musicals in London’s West End and with the English National Opera and, since becoming resident in Australia, has done a stint with the VSO in Pirates of Penzance and as principal understudy for the national tour of Seven Little Australians.

So it should come as no surprise to either of them if the first night of their two-person show, Sod ‘Em and Tomorrow is described as underdeveloped and under-rehearsed. Much of the content is promising, some of it excellent, but neither Hugh Halliday’s direction nor Wilson and Barnes’s performances succeed in hammering the show into any kind of unity.

The uncertainty of the stage personae and an equivocation towards the material makes it unclear whether Pat Wilson and Adrian Barnes want to be a late Eighties Dawn and Bobby, or take the urine out of such an idea. In fact, as is bound to be the case with yuppie satire, they are trying·to do both at the same time, so it is often hard to tell which side of the offense they are on. As a consequence, continuity founders and with it, the performers’ confidence.

The songs are vintage Pat Wilson. They lampoon and linger over designer labels, designer drugs, relationships, salvation, the manners of the workplace, safe sex and safe food. Items like Hey Let’s Relate and Stirling on a Sunday come from the earlier Unarmed Wombat set but remain wickedly apt, while ringins by Dillie Keane- I’m Giving up Jogging and Radiating Love (would you still hold my hand if the skin wasn’t there) graft in well with the new material – some Barnes/ Wilson collaborations and others of separate composition.

Highlights include the shopping list of multinational transgression in Sin the Supermarket, the New Age clarity of Crystal and the timing of Management Men. The best of Pat Wilson’s work has the end-stopped wit of a Tom Lehrer or an Ogden Nash with echoes of Grenfell and’ Flanders and Swann while Barnes’s pastiche hits the mark with the Gilbertian model of a modern Palestinian and the (Jalousie) Monogamy.

But with 26 songs, many of them requiring asphyxiating degrees of articulation, Pat Wilson and Adrian Barnes have created a marathon that has them gasping in the home straight. Sod ‘Em and Tomorrow could do with a thorough ·nip and tuck – the Equal Opportunity Rag and the lumpy Bicentenary Blues should both get the heave and others need shortening and sharpening. It also needs better integration and pacing.

Like their tea towel terrorists at the opening of Act II, Wilson and Barnes rely too much on a scattergun approach. They owe it to their best material to narrow their sights and make decisions about which targets are really worth hitting.

“Underdone” The Adelaide Review, No.62, April 1989, p.24.