Power or the passion: Griffin’s Emerald City

Growing out of the age-old ‘Sydney-or-Melbourne’ debate, David Williamson’s Emerald City is a timely look at the struggle any artist faces – maintaining artistic integrity, or chasing money and fortune – and sets it against the backdrop of Sydney in the 1980s, with all the big brash audacity that makes Sydney what it is today. Produced here by Griffin Theatre Company almost thirty years after it was written, Williamson’s play is a helter-skelter tennis match between acclaimed screenwriter Colin and his wife Kate, between Colin and seemingly well-connected hack-writer Mike, between Mike and his girlfriend Kate, between Colin and his agent Elaine, between… You can almost see each serve, each rally, each shot, every palpable hit (and miss), every point won and lost; it’s a giddy sparring match between equals, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the whole argument – even if it is, by turn, scintillating, bitter, snarky and futile.

Further on and further up: STC’s Travelling North

The idea of ‘going north’ is firmly rooted in the Australian psyche. Analogous perhaps with the great (American) road trip and the immense body of literature that has spawned from it, from Kerouac’s On The Road and Nabokov’s Lolita, to home-grown classics such as Michael Gow’s The Kid and Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (albeit partly in reverse), as well as the life-affirming Bran Nue Dae. There is the myth of the bush, the untameable wetlands and inhospitable red desert; the cattle-owners, the crocodile wrestlers, “the serial killers, salt-of-the-earth stalwarts, bigots [and] drag queens,” as Ailsa Piper writes in the program. Simply put, “the north is epic,” just as its allure is irresistible, and not just in a physical literal sense of ‘going north’.

The road trip has long been associated with coming-of-age stories and journeys of self-discovery. So it is in David Williamson’s Travelling North, presented here by Sydney Theatre Company. And while Williamson’s protagonists might be a generation or two older than most other literary road-trippers, the process of change and discovery, of soul-searching and path-finding, of going deeper in and further up, still speaks to our restless twenty-first century mindset as much as it did in 1979 when it premiered.