Much mocked and you get get why with its hard-drinking sex pest baby boomers, but it's full of energy and life and a real feeling for a time, place and people, particularly men. Don, the school teacher dreaming of the great Australian novel, a big fish in a little pond, full of thwarted dreams and incompetent adultery; Mal, the management consultant, grasping for money and sex and dreaming of politics; Cooley the sexual predatory, full of wit, vague artistic pretentious, driven by bitterness of his youth.
Those are the big three - the others are more defined by one trait, and I guess Williamson doesn't really have time, and at least the characters are very individual: Simon, the awkward Liberal; his wife Jody, another Liberal who discovers the joy of swinging; Kath, who is bitter and... actuallym just bitter; Jenny, probably the best female role, lonely, forever pregnant, burying her sadness in purchases; Susan, the groovy bisexual; Kerry, the sexy artist into free love (I think Williamson encountered a few of these women when at an impressionable age and it changed him forever); Evan the dentist who is... jealous and... that's it.
The background of the play is moving, the author is unflinching about his class and kind. I appreciate it now more than I did at uni.
No comments:
Post a Comment