Friday

Friday
By Daniela Giorgi. Old Fitzroy Theatre (NSW). Aug 6 – 13, 2013.

In Australia we’re blessed with some wonderful, desert-dry political satirists.  Think The Hollowmen, The Chaser boys, The Sydney Wharf Review mob, Clarke and Dawe, to say nothing of our cartoonists, comics and columnists. And with reality stars like Slipper and Thomson, Obeid and Macdonald and all the Sydney rorters at ICAC, who needs to make this stuff up?

The mystery in this timely political satire is why the scandal is so modest – a State Housing Minister driving without a license – and yet the story telling so witless and characters so unbelievable. 

On the small Fitzroy stage re-made as the offices of State Parliament, director Julie Baz has the luxury of 13 actors but few are convincing as its politicians, apparatchiks and media hacks. Only Gertraud Ingeborg as the Premier and Cherilyn Price as her Chief of Staff bring any truth or gravitas to their roles. 

With the Minister under attack, there are some nicely choreographed moments as the media chorus spin out with their hyperbolic headlines. But the insights of writer Daniela Giorgi into the workings of our media, politicians and policy-making are curiously glib and naïve.  

The general public, she argues, wants a better quality of democracy but lacks the commitment to demand or work for it.  A worthy theme, but her play does nothing to portray or inspire any better political engagement. Plot tangents, irrelevant characters and a verbose script leave the cast often vocally and physically awkward.  

Baz and Giorgi need to decide whether Friday is a realistic drama or an all-out slapstick comedy; for now it works as neither.

Martin Portus

Images: Gertraud Ingeborg and Cherilyn Price & Justine Kacir, Emmanuel Nicolaou, Peter Hayes, Sinead Curry and David Ritchie. Photographer: Katy Green Loughrey.

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