The State Theatre Company’s Beautland was commissioned to celebrate the International Year of Youth as part of the Come Out 85 Season in Adelaide.

Of his debut as director this season, State’s artistic director Keith Gallasch writes: “Our aim was to develop with Barry Dickins a play for adults about what it was like to be young in this country and … to recover some of the lost values of childhood, and of the past, that they had surrendered to contemporary pressures.”

What we are offered is a dream fantasy of John and Maria Sugarscoop who, like Dorothy and Toto, leave their jacuzzi in Kansas and have a meaningful experience getting in touch with those Aussie verities which existed before snotty dinner parties and all that other intellectual puddle.

The director writes: “Beautland involves caring and sharing, games, community singing, the heyday of radio … ” It sounds like a health camp.

Beautland is an endless paradise of Bonzers and Bluo, Minties, Brylcreem and people who can remember jingles we all thought we had forgotten.

Dickins, like Barry Humphries, has a good ear for the vernacular, but here his usually scabrous humour has no edge to it at all. Beautland is so excruciatingly G certificate and the past so unfailingly benign it is impossible to imagine ringworm or rickets, or Menzies or Calwell.

So John and Maria are reunited with their childhood toys – Garry Giraffe, Tim Tap and Max Marcos – and meet Old King Cole, Humpty Dumpty, two Father Christmases and, for good measure, God Almighty. He wears a brown cardy, talks like Sandy Stone and earnestly rebukes us with: “I just think we can all do a lot better.”

And so can Barry Dickins and his collaborators do better than this arch stuff. It is the Year of Youth, not the year of the infantile.

In the leads David Kendall and Joan Murray give the buttoned-down radio executive and his unhappy wife some droll sketching. The scenes of their misdeeds – his callousness to a talk-back caller threatening suicide and her rejection of her old proletarian mum – are almost impossible in their bathos, but the players manage to carry them.

In fact, all the performances are good – Andrew Tighe as Tim Tap, and Douglas Hedge and William Zappa in various roles. Peter Finlay and Dina Panozza provide energetic satire with the trendy philistines John and Ian Money and Ross Williams as the Mummy with smoker’s lung gives us some particularly dark comedy.

The set by Ken Wilby, with more than a few characteristic touches from the talented Mark Thompson, is a delight. It looks like a bag of lollies with its pastel geometric designs and the costumes are a witty hybrid of current fashion and comic strip.

Beautland is no hardship to watch – you just wonder who it’s supposed to be for. The jokes are there but they are too far apart and the audience tends to fasten on to individual sketches because the play as a whole is foundering.

With so much talent arrayed, Beautland itself causes us to expect more.

The National Times, May 10, 1985, p.38.