Daylight Saving

Inner Sydney has recently seen professional revivals of three notable pre-1990 Australian plays. John Romeril’s brilliantly chilling The Floating World (1974) preceded the paint-fresh return of David Williamson’s Emerald City (1987), both at the Stables Theatre. Now at the nearby and luxurious Eternity Playhouse comes Nick Enright’s 1989 farce Daylight Saving. Though consistently entertaining, this one shows its age.

While Romeril and Williamson constantly break free of their theatre-bound narratives to make points about their life and times, here Enright keeps his characters in their farcical straight jackets. It’s all to do with the plot, and while the plot develops and entangles, all goes well. But when the pace slows and mistaken identities and purposes are too soon resolved, there’s little else for us to consider except to admire the hurtling team of fine actors under Adam Cook’s direction.

Felicity (Rachel Gordon) and Tom (Christopher Stollery) are a power couple living in a house with an allegedly stunning view of Pittwater. She runs a local restaurant; he’s the manager/coach of a difficult top-drawer Aussie tennis player.

Tom leaves on business for America and, on the night the clocks go back after daylight saving, Felicity entertains Joshua (Ian Stenlake), a handsome US professor who was her first love. But their impending tryst is constantly interrupted by a horrendously selfish neighbour, Stephanie (Helen Dallimore), and by Felicity’s ditzy mother and “North Shore widow”, Bunty (Belinda Giblin).

Wine and oysters are scoffed; doors swing open and shut; mistakes are made and then swiftly remade. The Act Two arrival of brainless tennis ace Jason (Jacob Warner), “the Killer from Kiama”, adds further complications.

Enright is happy to have set his bright theatrical mechanism into motion, but there’s nothing much else going on besides fishing for laughs. It’s firmly a Sydney story and the audience loved every mention of Pittwater, Whale Beach, Crows Nest and Pymble.

There’s a bright and broad setting from designer Hugh O’Connor, though that vital front door really should have had a lock & key fitting.

Frank Hatherley 

Images: Rachel Gordon and Ian Stenlake & Helen Dallimore, Ian Stenlake, Belinda Giblin, Christ Stollery and Rachel Gordon. (c) Helen White.