Let the Sunshine
Let the Sunshine, Ensemble Theatre, May 14-July 4, Q Theatre, Penrith, July 14-18.
Casting is the key: get it right and the rest will flow – pretty much. Get it wrong and it’s all but impossible to fix. In the recently unretired David Williamson’s latest comedy, the casting – by director Sandra Bates – is spot on. And the laughs flow thereafter.
The plot: Emma (Emma Jackson) and Rick (Justin Stewart Cotta) are the contemporary Juliet and Romeo whose respective parents have as little in common as the Montagus and Capulets. Emma is a corporate lawyer whose deafening ambition to make partner is just beginning to clash with the ticking of her biological clock. Her glamorous mama Natasha (Kate Raison) and rough diamond developer papa Ron (Andrew McFarlane) live in dazzling oceanside splendour in Noosa.
Natasha’s long time-no see school friend Ros (Georgie Parker) has recently emigrated to the sun – and a more modest home – with leftie doco-filmmaker hubby Toby (William Zappa). Ros is a book publisher and has joined Natasha’s book group, with high ambitions to wean the gals off Barbara Taylor Bradford and onto Geraldine Brooks. Toby is licking his wounds after being conned by a fake victim and ridiculed from one end of Darlo/Surry Hills cafe society to the other. Rick is their son.
Rick is a struggling musician who works in a pub to keep himself in baked beans. A less likely match for Emma is hard to imagine. And therein lies the heart of the familiar plot.
Emma is a motor-mouthed version of Gina Hardfaced-Bitch, Rick is so laidback he’s almost horizontal. But there is an instant and tangible chemistry between the two that works. Consequently, the obstacles, antagonisms and almost-but-not-quites and inevitability of the outcome are not so much predictable as the whole point.
David Williamson has carved a niche – or genre – of a particular kind of comedy of manners that a particular kind of audience happily anticipates and enjoys. It’s both manners and mannered in that the characters are mirrors in which a range of people can see themselves. The face or type that stares back is not particularly flattering, but is almost always gifted with such smart, snappy one-liners that the target doesn’t care; or doesn’t realise.
The cast is adept at the brittle comedy required of them and the play whips along in a flurry of laughs and fun for the first half. After the interval – during which many at the bar tell one another how much their son/daughter husband/wife, next door neighbour/ sister of brother reminds them of one or other character – is rather more reflective. You wouldn’t need a degree in psychology to figure the outcome. But again, that’s hardly the point.
Williamson has not lost his touch with comedy or ear for human and societal foibles. He’s well served by the cast and creatives (set Graham Maclean, lighting Matthew Marshall) but I’d like to see him spending a little more time filling out the characters and serving his own talent better – he, we and it deserve the effort.
