Sorting Out Rachel

According to the Ensemble’s program, David Williamson has written ‘more than fifty-three produced plays’, though whether the current one is No. 54 is unclear. At any rate it’s a hell of a lot and, with an apparent lock on the Ensemble’s prime-time, two-month slot every year, who knows the number that the 75-year-old playwright will eventually reach.

Artistic Director Mark Kilmurry has handed over directing duties for this one to guest Nadia Tass, and sorting out Sorting Out Rachel proves a challenge to her. For it is not one of Williamson’s finest. 

There’s a huge amount of setting up to do before we can arrive at the Sydney home of Craig (Glenn Hazeldine) and Julie (Natalie Saleeba) and it’s all done in a North Queensland ‘out-of-the-way café’ scene between rich grandfather Bruce (John Howard) and his hidden, half-aboriginal daughter Tess (Chenoa Deemal). Tess demands half of her father’s $60 million fortune or the Will will be publicly disputed.

Now we go to Sydney, where Craig and Julie are rapidly running short of money, and where their 17-year-old daughter Rachel (Jenna Owen), a slacker at home and a trouble-maker and blogger at her expensive private school, is making life hell. Enter Grandad from Queensland with the bad news that will, apparantly, help nobody.

The actors gamely fight their corners. John Howard, despite looking big belly-wise, gives the old boy a wry and decisive twinkle, and Glenn Hazeldine and Natalie Saleeba bring life to the desperate couple, trapped in a house that definitely isn’t in upper class Bellevue Hills, where he would dearly love to be. Jenna Owen tops them all, playing one against the other, watchfully trying whiskey for the first time.

One trouble is the setting by Tobhiyah Stone Feller. One wall of Craig and Julie’s home stretches right across the three-sided stage, leaving no room for the Queensland café at the beginning, nor the Sydney meeting place at the end where Julie meets Tess for a decisive chat. The house set dominates all.

Not even the usually dependable Williamson laugh-lines ring true. In Bruce’s words, they’re ‘as false as the bottom of a smuggler’s suitcase’.

Frank Hatherley

Photographer: Heidrun Lohr