True Minds

True Minds
Written by Joanna Murray-Smith. Directed by Peter Houghton. Melbourne Theatre Company. World Premiere. Southbank Theatre, The Sumner. April 25 - June 8, 2013

Joanna Murray-Smith knows her audience, and understands how to meet their expectations. If she promises a screwball comedy, that’s what they get. There are more laughs in this play than in the entire recent Melbourne International Comedy Festival. But is that a good thing if it comes at the expense of emotional (and physical) truth?

The premise is simple. Daisy Grayson (Nikki Sheils) is the successful author of a book which contends no man will marry a woman his mother disapproves of. She is due to meet her future mother-in-law, an ultra conservative matriarch, and is afraid she won’t pass muster. On a stormy night her long divorced hippy mother (Genevieve Morris) and Marxist father (Alex Menglet) and her ex-lover Mitch (Adam Murphy), fresh from a rehab centre, all turn up before the dreaded Vivienne Reynolds ( Louise Siversen) minus her son Benedict (Matthew McFarlane) who has been delayed at the airport. Fair enough…it may not be Frank Capra, or even Richard Bean, but it certainly holds promise as a madcap romp.

Murray-Smith’s writing in this case is wide, but not deep. She touches on politics, marital relationships, Oedipal complexes, materialism, gay marriage, obsession, fear of being unloved, fear of loving, insecurity, Shakespeare’s sonnets, the need for approval and stereotypes (rather than archetypes). She doesn’t explore anything in depth, partly because of the range of subjects and the lack of time, but the script works on the surface and is full of some fabulous witty lines like the facetious,  “Let’s not go to a jazz club and discuss existentialism; let’s stay home and gift wrap the kindling!” Every character has a couple of zingers. The problem is they are all the playwright’s voice and have nothing to do with the truth or individuality of the characters.

Theatre-lovers would expect it to be the director’s job to go mining for emotional truth, to delve into the subtext of what these people are all about, to define their character arcs empathetically. They’d be wrong. Peter Houghton interprets wide as Broad (with a capital B) and so he turns screwball into farce….Ray Cooney for Intellectuals. Though, to be fair, every Cooney farce I’ve ever seen has some semblance of reality, something we can believe in.

The play is over choreographed within an inch of its life, and every move is for a laugh, not for truth. Be honest, what woman would ever put her panty-hose on standing-up and frog leaping over furniture when there’s a perfectly good sofa and chair she could sit on which would make it easier and quicker? It just would never happen, and if it did we would think Daisy was an idiot and wouldn’t want to know her. But it gets a laugh while destroying a character. What man, no matter how much under his mother’s thumb, would decide that the logs for the fire look untidy and should be individually wrapped and tied with a neat string bow (and beautifully, architecturally stacked to boot)? If such an anal idiot existed any woman would run for the hills and have nothing to do with him (he clearly needs treatment). But it gets a laugh and another character is trashed. Anomalies, or contrivances, like this come thick and fast. The paradox is that it’s hard to cringe at the fakery of it all when you’re laughing so hard.

The cast is great, given the cardboard cut-out characters they have to deal with, though even they look embarrassed by the contrived writer’s device Fothergill (or Fotheringham?) Award tag to the play. No believability in that either. Alex Menglet does manage to give some real humanity, beyond the direction, to Max Grayson though…and Tracy Grant Lord’s set and costume design work a treat.

This isn’t Murray-Smith’s best play by a long shot, but it will no doubt please her audience. In the hands of a more sensitive director, the shtick might be replaced by real caring for the characters and the journey, but there probably wouldn’t be as many laughs…just a lot more truth. Many of us would happily settle for that. I left the theatre hungry for some substance along with the laughter.

Coral Drouyn

Image: Nikki Shiels (Daisy Grayson), Matt McFarlane (Benedict Perring), Louise Siversen (Vivienne Fairfax) and Genevieve Morris (Tracey Grayson). Photographer: Jeff Busby.

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