Semipreciousness
Emerald City
by David Williamson
Sydney Theatre Company
Playhouse
Emerald City, David Williamson’s latest play about selling out in Sydney, sold out in Sydney, and has been doing business hand over fist here as well.
It is not hard to see why. Williamson is one of our most assured writers of dialogue and has a shrewd eye, if not for the manners and prejudices of our times, at least for those of regular theatre audiences. Emerald City, borrowing rather listlessly from The Wizard of Oz, purports to offer incisive satire of straw men, tin gods and lionesses but is really a bit like the Wizard himself. When you look behind the curtain it is all moral bluster and projection.
Williamson has much of the facility of Neil Simon or Alan Ayckbourn, but while they move into richer, more personal declaration, Williamson’s work gets shinier on the surface and relies too heavily on the pithy one-liner.
Colin and Kate are from Melbourne but they’ve moved to Sydney. Colin is a successful screenwriter but he is more of your artistic success. In Sydney he hopes to make a quid pro quo and in no time meets Mike, a mover with a peptic twinge, who’s just looking for some talent to hitch his wagon to.
In Williamson’s suave plotting, the more Colin goes for the money the less comes his way while Kate, pure-in-heart reformist, accelerates her career in publishing with a series of ideological about-faces that would make a Jesuit blush.
Because the play keeps darting from cynical pot-shotting comedy to the High Moral Ground you can’t help thinking that Williamson is having two Bob Hopes each way. Being the bastards these people are, they can make off-jokes in-character and Williamson’s play gets the laugh anyway. Chardonnay socialists and women’s issues are not exempt from the occasional joke but Emerald City comes close to being a redneck guffaw rather too often.
Williamson’s character, Colin, is uncertainly presented. As with Stoppard’s Henry in The Real Thing, there seems to be some special pleading going on and the confusing notion that he is the playwright’s mouthpiece.
Surely not. When Colin says, bereft of irony, ‘Don’t blame the city, the devil is in us’, the banality is alarming. At thatpoint we have to wonder what on earth all this Melbourne-Sydney twittering is about.
Richard Wherrett’s direction is urbane and fluent and Lawrence Eastwood’s revolving set in icky terrazzo and mozzie-zapper neon is gaudy. The cupidity of these people is not foreign to us. Since we can’t share the harbour views they are forever salivating over, at least we ought to get a more enticing glimpse of the good life that’s making them all so damnably Faustian.
John Bell’s performance as Colin is nimble and commanding, except when he nearly goes blue trying to get Williamson’s more ponderous speeches out. Robyn Nevin gives a splendid account of Kate, finding flair and sublety in a portrait that is clearer than on the page. As Mike, Drew Forsythe moves convincingly from cuban heels to Gucci loafers in the course of the play. He plays a likeable yob and gets some of the play’s most telling lines. Ruth Cracknell, who plays the film producer Elaine Ross, is as dry as a biscuit but her part, like the play itself, seems to run out of puff in the second act.
Emerald City is an undeniably clever and amusing piece but clever and amusing to no purpose. It trails its coat about integrity and loyalty and talks about harbour views as though they were cherry orchards but too often it’s just six bags of jokes in search of a play. Williamson has set his own high standards as a dramatist and the undeclared confusions in this play are a disappointment.
“Semi-preciousness” The Adelaide Review, No.40 July, 1987, p.21.