REVIEW BY MARK STOYICH
Up For Grabs
By David Williamson
Sydney Theatre Company
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
Until April 21
Up For Grabs is ostensibly about the art market, but it is full of the usual gossip about the Sydney social types that Williamson likes to lampoon and his audiences love to recognise. This latest David Williamson play (they have become annual or even bi-annual events) has been packing in the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) subscribers, in spite of reviews that are more lukewarm than usual.
Simone (Helen Dallimore) — young, beautiful and ambitious to succeed in the art business — has only a few days to sell a client's Brett Whiteley painting for at least $2 million or she'll have to sell her flat and thereby lose her pissed-off husband played by Simon Burke (he has a beard because he's a psychiatrist). This wholly dubious plot is what would give the play its suspense, had it been suspenseful.
As for buyers, Simone has three possibilities: two couples who are vulgar nut-cases and a grim alcoholic woman who buys art for a big securities firm.
One couple are "new money" from the Eastern suburbs, Manny (Garry McDonald) and Felicity (Angela Punch McGregor). Squabbling and philistine, they acquire expensive objects to make up for their unhappiness at their gay son, who Manny hates and has driven away. Inevitably, in this land of the clumsy paradox, Manny is secretly gay and pays women to have anal sex with him with a dildo. Soon he is offering $2 million and a large pink dildo to Simone. Can this be our beloved Norman Gunston, 1970s symbol of Australian innocence, waving a dildo in the face of the bourgeois audience?
The other potential suckers are wired, kinky kids Mindy (Kirstie Hutton) and Kel (Felix Williamson — David's son and convincing evidence that talent may not run in families). They are even newer money: they make millions per minute from a dot-com ... or something (I suspect David Williamson has as much trouble understanding just what's going on in the "new economy" as does everyone his age). Mindy likes to do it with girls and Kel likes to watch, so they propose a deal with Simone.
We are far from Bernard Berenson here. Interestingly, this is a play about art with no artists or art-lovers ... and not much art. Simone says she genuinely likes art and thinks the Whiteley is good, but not worth $2 million. She is torn between wanting to be honest and wanting to use the suckers as they want to use her. It is these sorts of moral dilemmas that Williamson deals in, and like his art-dealer character, has to resort to tricks to gull the audience.
In fact, Williamson is the playwright equivalent of Brett Whiteley — highly marketable (his plays keep the STC subscriber list going), loved by the middle class, very Sydney and known even by those who don't like theatre. But, like the artist, as he grows older he must resort more blatantly to gimmicks, like the dildo that raised titters from the aging audience members.
As for the moral aspect, Williams presents the new rich for the audiences to laugh at and tut-tut over. Society writers have always done this — even Moliere — and there's no reason it can't be good. However, in this case, sloppy stage craft (too much told directly to the audience rather than shown) and cardboard cut-out characters make it very bad.