Aria

Australia’s best-known playwright, soon to be 83, returns to Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre with yet another fine play. Incredibly active still, David Williamson tried out this play in Noosa, Queensland last year and now lets fly in his Sydney headquarters, much to the delight of his many fans.

Aria features Monique (Tracy Mann), a narcissistic personality who believes the only reason the world is there is to shower praise on her. Now I wonder who that reminds us of! Every year she invites her three idolised sons and their current wives to her posh house for lunch and the chance to listen to (and praise) her singing an aria from her supposed days at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music.

The setting (by Rose Montgomery) is spot-on, with a baby-grand-piano covered in family photographs, and a wall full of artworks. Here, among the many bottles of sparkling wine, Monique greets her family.

There’s Advertising son Charlie (Rowan Davie) and his spectacular new wife Midge (Tamara Lee Bailey) with her amazingly expensive hairdo; fiery politician Liam (Jack Starkey-Gill) with his down-trodden wife and mother of four, Chrissy (Suzannah McDonald); unhappy Architect Daniel (Sam O’Sullivan) with his heated wife Judy (Danielle King), who is determined to move her daughter from an expensive private school - where she is learning how to be ‘a heartless sociopath’ - to Concord High. Cue for shocked looks and many protests from Monique.

By the time it comes for Monique’s performance of the promised Aria and her inevitable crash landing, there’s not a trace of sympathy for this blatant wrecker of families. We are fully on the side of the three women – and especially on the side of Tamara Lee Bailey, who sashays her way marvellously through a thousand rotten looks and comments.

Director Janine Watson holds it all together beautifully. And Williamson, the ‘compulsive writer’, is charged up and raring to go. Where next?

Frank Hatherley

Photographer: Prudence Upton