Corporate Vibes
Written by David Williamson
Directed by Robyn Nevin
Sydney Theatre Company
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
Review by Mark Stoyich
Fairy tales about modern life seem to be the trend in theatre now. In Beatrix Christian's Fred, selfish, urban types find redemption (through childbirth, I think), while in Williamson's latest, a ruthless, vulgar property developer is persuaded by an Aboriginal psychologist not to fire his non-performing staff, and to allow them to build a low-rent innovative block of flats to boot.
The play has been criticised, not for the unlikeliness of its plot, but for its lack of depth. As usual, the critics have missed the point to Williamson: going to one of his plays for psychological insight is like going to the BMW factory and complaining that the engines don't play Beethoven.
In this play, we get a clear and mildly amusing picture of how awful things are in the corporate world, with archetypes everyone can understand and references to real people everyone can grasp.
Williamson is the Great Engineer of Australian theatre. He deals with human conflict in the context of modern social conditions, and would be Australia's Ibsen, except while Ibsen's plays still mean something to us long after we've ceased to care about the condition of late 19th century Norwegian industry, I can't imagine anyone wanting to revive Williamson's plays a century hence, except desperate literature thesis writers, whom I presume will be extinct by then.
But they do what they do efficiently. Also — and I think most critics miss this — they are well intentioned and may get an audience that is not used to thinking to do so. They are not written for us, the sort of bleeding-heart wimps whom Sam the businessman so despises, but for people like Sam, who may never go to the theatre normally, but might sit through something by a big success who's reliable, always easily understandable and good for a laugh.
His plays whirr away like a well-oiled machine (or whatever the modern equivalent is). He may not be Ibsen, but he could be our George Bernard Shaw. Although, while Shaw had his vision of tomorrow, Williamson, in his good Protestant Australian way, just hopes for a few improvements — one step at a time, as the psychologist character says at the end of Corporate Vibes.
William Zappa has become the all-purpose thrusting businessman of the Sydney stage: he was fine doing this in David Hare's Skylight, and he's fine as Sam in this. Deborah, the Aboriginal, miracle-working human resources director, is not strongly written enough to bear Lydia Miller's rather weak performance. (Williamson can't have found this part any easier to write than Miller did to act it — so many issues crammed into one character!)
As the brow-beaten employees who find themselves, Andrew McFarlane is as cute as ever and Caroline Kennison is good as Angela the architect.
But why are Tony Llewellyn-Jones and Olivia Pigeot given accents, South African and New Zealander respectively? Is it to heighten the caricatural nature of their roles? Or to shift the blame for Sydney's ugly skyline to our Commonwealth friends? Isn't it bad enough that each of these characters is tricked out with a pat psychological problem to explain their behaviour, without giving them funny accents as well?
But then, that's why Williamson could never be Ibsen. While Ibsen's Master Builder wanted to build "castles in the air — but with solid foundations", Williamson the Engineer is happy to construct — what? The equivalent of Sam the property developer's glitzy apartment complexes, with some low-rent moralising in the basement.