Emerald City.

Already a successful screenwriter, Colin (Isaac Reilly) craves greater creative control of producing screenplays, and to facilitate this has dragged his wife, Kate (Victoria Tyrrell Dixon), and their three children from Melbourne to Sydney, where the action is.

Kate, working as a book publisher, has always done the lion’s share in raising the family and remains supportive, but she dislikes Sydney’s power to seduce people into grasping for money in order to obtain harbour views.  And she is aware that, in concert with his usual producer, Elaine (Helen McFarlane), Colin’s career has been stellar.  As Kate’s own star begins to rise, Colin progressively becomes uncertain of his motivations.

But Colin’s major problem, as he sees it, is that key investor Malcolm (Patrick Collins) isn’t sold on Colin’s vision for the movie he’d like to produce.

Then Colin meets Mike (Daniel Greiss), who hustles him into working together on Colin’s project and subsequently on other projects, distracting him to the point that money largely displaces art in Colin’s priorities — aside from the dazzling additional distraction of Mike’s girlfriend, Helen (Hannah Lance).

Emerald City pits ideals of artistic and personal integrity against the ideal of parting corporate investors from their money in order to make the art to uphold the integrity… and manages to pit them against each other even within each of the play’s characters, with interesting results.

Being part of a David Williamson work, these characters think and argue in unexpected ways.  As their conflicting values and consequent motivations clash and come under test, we in the audience experience a richness of thought that is both stimulating and relevant.  It helped that costuming, props, and the well-lit, multiple-part, multiple-function set provided the perfect support for the players’ acting, which provided the audience with plenty of laughter and fodder for discussion.  But, beautiful set and perfect props aside, what chiefly allowed us to relax into the unfolding before us was that the actors took their time to voice their thoughts naturally.

Beautifully set up in a new performance venue in Kingston, The Hub, Free-Rain’s production of this marvellous satire on materialist appropriation of culture made for an evening of hilarity.

John P. Harvey

Images: top [L–R] Daniel Greiss and Helen McFarlane and lower [L–R] Isaac Reilly and Victoria Tyrrell Dixon. Photographer: Cathy Breen