Chasing the Dragon
By Nick Enright
Wharf Theatre, Sydney
Navigating
By Katherine Thomson
Opera House Playhouse
Reviewed by Mark Stoyich
David Williamson and Nick Enright are Australia's most successful and prolific playwrights, and represent the opposite poles of our country's traditional culture in all its majestic breadth.
While Williamson is the stern, exacting Melbourne Protestant, Enright is Sydney and Irish Catholic and, at his worst, writes work abounding in sentimental cliché.
Enright's Chasing the Dragon presents a world in which French nuns go blind, Aboriginal teenage boys know of secret caves filled with rock art, and mothers released from Asian prisons return, full of wisdom, to seek their daughters who, all unknowing, spurn them.
This play appears to have been written as a vehicle for Sandy Gore, and has the characters paying tribute to her entrancing voice, thereby saving this critic the trouble.
Gore's voice is the best thing going in Enright's attempt at an adult fairytale, but even that instrument has trouble sustaining interest when used to tell the interminable and apparently pointless orientalist tales which the fallen mother uses to try to win over her natural daughter.
Part of Enright's problem is that he is so prolific, and the range of his work is so broad — everything from the ghastly north shore beach-house comedy, Daylight Saving (another vehicle for Sandy Gore!), to his fictionalised version of the lives of two playwrights, Mongrels. That was a truly good play, but then it had a truly interesting subject, two of Australia's most extraordinary '70s writers.
As a sentimental journeyman writer, Enright is proficient and certainly popular. The overall theme of his plays seems to be the mysterious influence that can be exerted by a charismatic outsider or rebel. But, especially given his tendency to write about teenagers, too often the dragon he pursues leads nowhere except to the fabled cave of ABC soap opera.
Katherine Thomson presents a similar problem in Navigating. This tale of civic corruption in a seaside community, and the brave but doomed attempt of the heroine to combat it, while plagued by dark family secrets, is like an episode of the ABC's Sea Change written by Ibsen.
Navigating too has to be carried by an actor-hero (Noni Hazlehurst), but unlike Enright's work, Thomson's is talky and badly structured.
Both writers suffer from a general mediocrity. In Thomson's case, this trend was broken some years back with Diving for Pearls. But generally, in trying to navigate between the rock of naturalism and the whirlpool of symbolism, they sink, like so many others, in Australia's shallow waters.