True Minds

Joanna Murray Smith is one of Australia’s most prolific and popular playwrights. She knows her middle-class audience and writes accordingly. The premise of True Minds is that a man never marries a woman his mother doesn’t approve of, a concept espoused in a best-selling book by the protagonist Daisy Grayson (Beck Haining).

On a stormy night, Daisy’s warehouse loft is besieged by her divorced hippy, prone to bedding-younger-men mother Tracey (Leigh Varma), her philandering and politically leftist father Maxim (Trevor Bond), her ex-lover recently released from rehab Mitch (Stephen Quinn), and the far-right stitched-up mother Vivienne (Beverley Wood) of her newly intended lawyer fiance Benedict (Trevor Sammon).

Every hot button topic is floated from the feminist agenda, gay marriage, substance-abuse, parents and more in a facetious script that is full of laughs but little humanity. Frequently the characters sound like they’re spouting quips from an ABC panel show. Director Gary O’Neil keeps it moving at a fast clip despite a plethora of tongue-twisting wordy laugh lines.

Haining played Daisy with a nice edgy fire, making her believable within the frequently unbelievable scenario - like who could seriously love a man who likes to individually wrap his firewood and tie it with a bow? But this is broad satire of the pretentious yuppie set. Quinn’s bad-boy Mitch was one of the most honest characters on the stage and whilst the character tropes are clichéd Quinn brought an added likeable spin. Bond’s expletive-driven Maxim was an asset, as was Wood’s Vodka prone Vivienne, whilst Varma’s flower-power ideology painted Tracey with a broad brush.

The set was eons away from the look of a converted Melbourne industrial warehouse, but the music, which mined the Leonard Cohan songbook, couldn’t have been better.

Peter Pinne