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Parody and shock tactics in tantalising Aussie play

Deborah LaHatte
Mon, 17 Sep 2012

The Gift by Joanna Murray-Smith, directed by Colin McColl for the Auckland Theatre Company at the Maidment Theatre, Auckland until October 6.

The Gift only lasted 90 minutes but my companion and I argued about it for a good two hours afterward and I’m sure we weren’t alone in this.

There is a fascinating mystery in this play which I don’t want to reveal so, if you intend going to the play – and I recommend you do – don’t read beyond the subheadline SPOILER.

It is two plays in one: the first part a riproaringly funny parody of a  Rich Lister middle-aged couple meeting a younger, fragrant, Grey Lynn style conceptualist artist and his arts journalist wife.

Murray-Smith so accurately mimicks the rich couple’s speech patterns and bitchy quips that you begin to wonder if it isn’t turning into another let’s-attack-the-rich tirade of the Steven Berkoff type play.

But no, she turns her writing guns on the artistic couple too, creating recognisably pretentious young twits. To do so, she references some of the postmodern art controversies including Damien Hirst works (such as flies eating a dead cow at the Tait Modern) and Martin Creed's A door opening and closing and a light going on and off. Since she is Australian she won’t have heard about the inverted bus shelter at the Waikato Museum yet … Still, her artist earnestly says considering conceptual art is about “suspending doubt,”; which is a deliciously funny take on art and of course denies healthy skepticism.

But even as the one-liners continue, to the audience’s great delight, she starts to flesh out the characters. The older couple, a self-made hardware store franchisor proud of his exports and his horse stud and his ex-secretary hostess wife are on their 25th wedding anniversary at a sumptuous resort to reinvigorate their marriage and meet the young couple who have won a holiday in a raffle. Oddly enough, they get on enormously well and find much in common (jazz, their narcissim and their selfishness) and choose to hire a boat together. During the trip the older man Ed (Marshall Napier) falls out of the boat and is rescued and resuscitated by the younger man Martin (Simon London). Ed and his wife Sadie (Sarah Peirse) are so grateful that they offer the younger couple a gift in gratitude (a pedigreed horse expected to have a brilliant racing future) but the younger couple demur. Ed insists the couple join them a year later for a holiday and choose a gift they really want.

The Gift is largely delightful and the acting by all four (including the arts journalist Chloe (Laura Hill) was excellent ensemble work choreographed superbly within a carefully small space. Both couples had an easy rapport with their partners that added to their credibility.

Here I must mention the superb and original set by Rachael Walker. At first it hints of a giant sun lounger, to become by turns a beach resort, motor boat and a swish apartment. Projections against the background worked charmingly at times, particularly during a wil storm at sea scene.

Costuming was spot on too.

It may have been the deliberate Australian accents with extreme raised sentence endings but at times the lighter voices needed more resonance.

SPOILER coming up

The last part of the play has the couple happily reuniting at the older couple’s apartment. In the intervening year Ed has learned to like and understand conceptual art. He shows a new admiration for Martin’s work. He and Sadie are keen to hear what gift Martin and Chloe have chosen.

It’s a shocker. The younger couple have a young daughter conceived by accident and now aged five. The gift they request is that the older couple (who did not have children) take her. Martin and Chloe argue they are bad parents and can’t keep up with all the worries of modern parents. They both want to pursue their creativity and art rather than raise the child. Ed is shocked and disgusted. “Does the world NEED another genius?” he yells at one exasperated and shocked moment. Sadie vacillates, trying to listen to the young couple’s argument as Ed rejects it.

The play ends as a film of the daughter, Eleanor, dancing plays in the background.

Did they take the child? We don’t know. That was just the start of the argument we had over this plot. Are two middle-aged people with no recent experience with children ideal parents? Why didn’t the young couple hand the child to someone in their own circle – family even? Why at no point are we introduced to the child?

Why is the child’s opinion not sought?  This last question is where our arguments ended up – why treat a child as a commodity?

If Murray-Smith had done some classical research, she might have been able to drop in references to Jean Jacques Rousseau, the brilliant writer, who was also known for forcing his mistress to give up all five of their children to an orphanage so she could concentrate on him and he on his art.

Further back, one could take the examples of families who fostered their children out until they were of a civilised age or of the earlier Romans who owned their children and could sell them into slavery.

Instead of references like these which would have made her horrific argument logical and arguable, we hear that Martin’s great work is a glass cage with a holograph of a child in light inside. So, in the end, the play within a play becomes nonsensical and not a discussion of various forms of morality.

Still, the play is engaging and well worth seeing.

BTW, go early. Parking around the Maidment is impossible.

Deborah LaHatte
Mon, 17 Sep 2012
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Parody and shock tactics in tantalising Aussie play
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