Sadly, the ship has sailed for one of Australia’s best playwrights, David Williamson.
His latest play, The Puzzle, raises many puzzling questions, namely, why was it written, why were there no confidantes to provide honest feedback, and why did the State Theatre Company produce it?
Perhaps the answer to all questions is the legendary status of the playwright’s name.
Williamson confesses the idea for the play came to him when collaboratively working on a jigsaw puzzle on a cruise and noting that the task drew different people to mingle as they contributed to solving the puzzle. He then wondered, what would happen if people who shouldn’t meet met through this device? At this point, the thought process changed course and foundered in the choppy seas of contrived farce.
The story takes place on board a “Lifestyle Cruise”, which is a special cruise dedicated to swingers; couples who like to swap partners for sexual exploration and expression. Drew (Erik Thomson) is a divorced, middle-aged accountant who has taken his 27-year-old daughter, Cassie (Ahunim Abebe) on the cruise for some bonding time after his separation, not realising the “saucy” nature of the cruise. The play opens with him meeting Mandy (Anuya Nathan), who is putting a jigsaw together in a public recreation area on deck. We soon meet Craig (Nathan O’Keefe) in a flashback scene as he works overtime to convince his wife, Mandy, to revive their dormant sex life through swinging on a Lifestyle Cruise. Later, Michele (Anna Lindner) and partner, Brian (Chris Asimos), cross paths, so to speak, with Craig and Mandy, as they explore the promised land of swinging.
There is a heavy mist of naivety hanging in the air throughout this show. The two swinging advocates, Craig and Michele, parrot lines about the benefits of swinging, gleaned from podcasts and videos, in such a wooden manner, it’s hard to believe they have conviction in the actions they are trying to sell. Director, Shannon Lush, seems to have chosen this deer-in-the-headlights stiffness in her actors’ mannerisms, demeanours, and vocalisations, perhaps to amplify the sterile, passionless nature of having sex with a myriad of rules and a partner looking on. Unlike some of the visceral, fleshy action from Williamson’s early and confronting works like The Removalist, this production portrays sexual elements with a prissy, timid sense of going-through-the-motions while remaining almost completely hands-off. There is no darkness here, there is no danger, there is no daring; it’s like a young professionals’ dinner party conversation where a few guests have become a tiny bit tipsy but are too well drilled in polite manners to colour outside the lines.
There are some laughs along the way, mostly predicated on the anticipation of raw, slap-you-in-the-face Williamson taboo-shredding quips and scenarios. Sadly, such energy dwindles soon after interval, not helped by the fact that no character is developed enough for us to actually care about their plight. It’s like we’re glancing at travellers in the distance.
That said, there are a few moments where the spark of theatre glowed. The set (Ailsa Paterson) was majestic with its rich skyline and clever, breezy use of space with discrete areas for action. The music proved composer, Andrew Howard, fully immersed himself in the 70s porn soundtrack genre. This first scene is played confidently and well, with sharp cues and wonderful tug-of-war between Thomson and Nathan. We get a similar glimpse of this in the bedroom with Lindner and Asimos (who pulled off his well-endowed character with great aplomb).
Having to write this review has been a shit of a job. I love almost every single play David Williamson has written. They have shocked me and they have taught me about society and relationships. But what this reviewer experienced on open night, it felt to me like it was something churned out by a mini, AI-bot version of the great playwright, having been fed the Wikipedia entry on Lifestyle Cruises and the plot lines of some tepid, public domain, bedroom farces from the 1800s.