The Anatomy of Buzz

The Anatomy of Buzz
By Carl Caulfield. Stray Dogs Theatre. Directors: Carl Caulfield and Felicity Biggins. Civic Playhouse, Newcastle (NSW). February 5 – 22, 2014

Carl Caulfield’s new play opens with Ben Quilty, who has worked at Newcastle company Sunbeam Corp for 30 years and risen to be sales manager, being interviewed by Nick Norton, the son of the firm’s late founder.

Norton tells him the company is in a precarious position and it’s time for change, so he’s called in an organisational consultant, Dixon Uzzi, he met at a business school in the United States.

Uzzi’s skill in the use of buzz words and accompanying images soon has the staid Ben replacing his conservative clothes with more hip gear and finding his changed corporate lifestyle influencing his home life and relationships with wife Kristen, 21-year-old son Tom and late-teens daughter Amy.

This is very much a story of today, and Caulfield has clearly researched corporate change and associated buzz, with the first act amusingly showing the techniques used to make everything old seem new again.

There is a delightful scene, for example, where Dez Robertson’s Uzzi addresses the audience as the company employees, with a video providing smile-raising illustrations of his regenerating artistry.

Paul Sansom gives amusing warmth to Ben’s middle-aged rediscovery of himself, whether twerking energetically while listening to a pop song or recalling his youthful dreams when he’s presented with a space-suited Action Man figure.

His initial inability to talk meaningfully to his children about their behaviour at his wife’s urging also strikes a nerve among watchers.

Angela McKeown’s Kristen, similarly under cost-saving pressure in her workplace, is frustrated by her husband’s initially narrow viewpoint and welcomes his seemingly more understanding views.

Tom, the son who irritates his father with talk of social values being worthless, is shown by Theo Rule to be determined to bring about change when he films himself talking passionately about cultural inequities.

Siobhan Caulfield’s daughter Amy, on the other hand, confirms through her mobile phone and laptop computer conversations her parents’ belief that she wants to have fame as a celebrity.

By contrast, Alex Jacobs, as Nick Norton, is clearly a young man with the single-minded purpose of saving the company his family established.

Directors Carl Caulfield and Felicity Biggins keep the action moving engagingly along in the first half, with the technical work, including buzz words and phrases on the black, grey and white backdrop designed by Biggins and Robyn Greenwell, helping to make it very much a story for today.

Sadly, the tale descends into soap-opera in the second act, with much of the characters’ behaviour, especially that of Ben Quilty, challenging believability and making it all too easy to see what will happen next. It is to the credit of the actors that they hold the interest of the audience after the buzz disappears.

Ken Longworth

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