Emerald City

by David Williamson

  Playwright’s Biography

  David Williamson has been Australia’s best known and most widely performed playwright for the last forty years. He has produced over fifty plays, including: Emerald City, The Removalists, Don’s Party, The Club, Travelling North, The Perfectionist, Sons of Cain, Money and Friends, Brilliant Lies, Dead White Males, After the Ball, The Jack Manning Trilogy, The Great Man, Up For Grabs, Soulmates, Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrott, Nothing Personal, When Dad Married Fury, Managing Carmen, Rupert and most recently, Cruise Control. His plays have been translated into many languages and performed internationally, including major productions in London, Los Angeles, New York and Washington (The Club in 1979 and Rupert at the Kennedy Center in 2014). Up For Grabs went on to a West End production starring Madonna in the lead role.

  David’s screen adaptations of his own plays include Emerald City, The Removalists, Don’s Party, The Club, Travelling North, along with his original screenplays for feature films including Libido, Petersen, Gallipoli, Phar Lap, The Year of Living Dangerously, and Balibo (as co-writer) and for television he adapted On The Beach. David’s many awards include 11 Australian Writers’ Guild Awards, 4 Australian Film Institute Awards for Best Screenplay and, in 1996, the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Award. David has been named one of Australia’s Living National Treasures.

  FIRST PRODUCTION

  Emerald City was first performed by the Sydney Theatre Company at the Drama Theatre of the Sydney Opera House on 1 January 1987, with the following cast:

  COLIN John Bell

  ELAINE Ruth Cracknell

  KATE Robyn Nevin

  MIKE Max Cullen

  HELEN Andrea Moor

  MALCOLM Dennis Grosvenor

  Director, Richard Wherrett

  Designer, Laurence Eastwood

  Emerald City was produced by Griffin Theatre Company at the SBW Stables Theatre, Sydney, opening on 17 October 2014, with the following cast:

  COLIN Mitchell Butel

  ELAINE Jennifer Hagan

  KATE Lucy Bell

  MIKE Marcus Graham

  HELEN Kelly Paterniti

  MALCOLM Gareth Yuen

  Director, Lee Lewis

  Designer, Ken Done

  Costume Designer and Associate Set Designer, Sophie Fletcher

  Lighting Designer, Luiz Pampolha

  Composer, Kelly Ryall

  Stage Manager, Vanessa Wright

  CHARACTERS

  COLIN ROGERS, a scriptwriter, 40-ish

  ELAINE ROSS, his agent, 50

  KATE, a publisher, Colin’s wife, 40-ish

  MIKE McCORD, an entrepreneur, 40s

  HELEN, a PR consultant, late 20s

  MALCOLM, a merchant banker, 40s

  ACT ONE

  COLIN stands by a window, gazing out. He is a handsome, engaging man in his late thirties whose natural disposition is warm and open, though when he feels uncertain or under attack, he’s capable of an aloof almost arrogant air and of sharp retaliation. He is watched by ELAINE ROSS, a shrewd capable woman in her fifties.

  COLIN: [turning away from the window] What other city in the world could offer a view like this?

  ELAINE: Rio. But I’m prepared to believe it’s the second most beautiful city in the world.

  COLIN: I used to come here when I was a kid and go back with my head full of images of lushness. Green leaves spilling over sandstone walls, blue water lapping at the sides of ferries. Flame trees, jacaranda, heavy rain, bright sun.

  ELAINE: [drily] Yes, there’s no lack of colour.

  COLIN: Everything in Melbourne is flat, grey, parched and angular. And everything is controlled and moderate. It never rains in buckets like it does here in Sydney, it drizzles. The wind never gusts, it creeps along the streets like a wizened old mugger and slips a blade into your kidneys. Sydney has always felt like a city of subtropical abundance.

  ELAINE: Abundance. [Nodding] Yes. There’s abundance. Sometimes I’m not sure of what.

  COLIN: There’s a hint of decadence too, but to someone from the puritan south, even that’s appealing.

  ELAINE: I didn’t drag you up here, then?

  COLIN: No, I would’ve come years ago, but I couldn’t persuade Kate. She’s convinced Sydney is full of con men, crooks and hustlers.

  ELAINE: She’s right.

  COLIN: Melbourne has its quota of shysters.

  ELAINE: Sydney is different. Money is more important here.

  COLIN: Why more so than Melbourne?

  ELAINE: To edge yourself closer to a view. In Melbourne all views are equally depressing, so there’s no point.

  COLIN: [laughing] I’m not convinced.

  ELAINE: It’s true. No-one in Sydney ever wastes time debating the meaning of life—it’s getting yourself a water frontage. People devote a lifetime to the quest. You’ve come to a city that knows what it’s about, so be warned. The only ethic is that there are no ethics, loyalties rearrange themselves daily, treachery is called acumen and honest men are called fools.

  COLIN: I thought you liked the place?

  ELAINE: I do. It’s my city and I accept it for what it is. Just don’t behave as if you’re still in Melbourne, because if you do you’ll get done like a dinner.

  ELAINE exits. COLIN moves thoughtfully to centre stage. KATE walks on. She’s Colin’s wife. An attractive, vivacious and intelligent woman in her thirties. Her frowning earnestness often makes her funny when she’s not trying to be.

  COLIN: This is an amazing city.

  KATE: [bluntly] I hate it.

  COLIN: [suddenly angry] Christ, Kate! If you’re going to be this negative right from the start, let’s just cancel everything and go back south.

  KATE: We can’t. You insulted everybody as soon as you knew we were going.

  COLIN: It’s a stunning city, Kate. You should see the view that Elaine’s got.

  KATE: To judge a city by the views it offers is the height of superficiality. This city is dreadful. The afternoon paper had three words on the cover: ‘Eel Gets Chop’, and no matter how much I juggle that around in my mind I can’t find a meaning that justifies the whole front page of a newspaper.

  COLIN: To judge a city by one afternoon newspaper is also the height of superficiality.

  KATE: All the media here is devoted to trivia. The places to be seen dining in, the clothes to be seen wearing, the films to be seen seeing—it’s all glitter and image and style. New York without the intellect.

  COLIN: What’s Melbourne? Perth without the sunshine?

  KATE: People in Melbourne care about more than the image they project.

  COLIN: They seem just as eager for money and fame as anyone is.

  KATE: My friends don’t care about money and fame. Terri works her guts out in the Western suburbs helping kids fight their way out of intellectual and physical poverty. Sonia tries to repair the psyches of wives whose husbands beat the Christ out of them, and Steve uses his legal skills to try and stop the powerless being ripped off by the powerful—

  COLIN: [interrupting] Have you ever seen any of them laugh? Wait, I’m wrong. I have. When one of Sonia’s battered wives sliced off her husband’s member. She had quite a chuckle over that one. And she didn’t want the wife to go to prison because it was only a ‘one-off act’.

  KATE: They might have tunnel vision in some areas—

  COLIN: [interrupting] Some areas? That lot are so paranoid they blame the CIA if the weather turns cloudy!

  KATE: At least they don’t live their lives totally for themselves.

  COLIN: You know what I couldn’t stand about them? Their smug self-righteousness. They were all earning salaries five times the size of any of the poor bastards they were supposed to be helping.

  KATE:
Alright. You didn’t like them. I did.

  COLIN: I have heard Terri laugh too, come to think of it. When I fractured my elbow tripping over that clump of wheezing fur she claims is a cat.

  KATE: They used to laugh a lot. Just not when you were around.

  COLIN: What’s that meant to mean?

  KATE: You picked a fight with them every time they opened their mouths.

  COLIN: Can you blame me? They made it quite clear they despised the films I’d written.

  KATE: Colin, you’re paranoid.

  COLIN: They despised them. My scripts were about the lives of middle-class trendies. The truth was they were the biggest middle-class trendies of the lot. Steve managed to hate my films without ever seeing one.

  KATE: [laughing] Colin, you’re totally paranoid.

  COLIN: [agitated that she won’t believe him, impassioned] He told me with immense pride that he’d never seen an Australian film in his life, and that in the last ten years he’d never seen a film that didn’t have subtitles. How trendy can you get? How many working-class Australians drink vintage wine every night of the week like that lot did? How many working-class Australians go to listen to Hungarian string quartets? How many working-class Australians find the neorealist fabulism of the South American novel ‘sadly passé’. Those friends of yours were right on the cutting edge of middle-class trendiness, yet they kept telling me—not directly and honestly like their beloved working-class would—but subtly and snidely, that if I was a real writer I’d be tackling the problems of the real people in our society. The poor, the maimed, the halt and the blind. I must never, never write about the lifestyles they themselves were leading. Pricks! Loathsome, do-gooding, trendy pricks! Stuff them!

  KATE: Perhaps they felt it was a little self-indulgent to concentrate on the problems of the middle class when the problems of the disadvantaged are so much more acute.

  COLIN: I see. The middle class have no real problems. So how is it they manage to pack so many traumas and breakdowns into their sunny middle-class lives? How is it that they unerringly turn every relationship they embark on into the storyline of a soap opera?

  KATE: I don’t think that comment’s justified, Colin. Teresa’s been married for eighteen years.

  COLIN: Yes, but has anyone ever seen Gavin in the last fifteen? I know he’s supposed to be writing poetry upstairs, but my guess is that he’s been in Kathmandu since the early seventies.

  KATE: [finding his histrionics amusing] Colin.

  COLIN: I know the middle class shouldn’t have emotional problems—they’re infinitely better off in a material sense than your average Third World villager—but for some perverse reason they successfully screw up their lives with great flair, and I find that interesting, and I’m going to keep charting their perturbations and try and make some sense of it all, and those chardonnay socialists of Melbourne aren’t going to stop me!

  KATE: [to the audience] If I hated Sydney that much, why did I agree to come? In hindsight I suspect that there was something in me that responded to that odd, pulsing, garish city to the north. A reckless streak, a habit of getting quickly bored—I think that deep down I felt something might happen up here. And until it did I was in the happy position of having Colin to blame for all the misfortunes that befell us.

  COLIN: [to the audience] I shouldn’t’ve been so bloody reckless. What kind of idiot uproots himself from a lifetime of connections for childhood memories of flame trees and jacarandas? Lunatic. But was it just that? Wasn’t there a little grub in my soul hungry for the lionising and celebrity mania that grips the harbour city? Devouring my integrity until I drifted towards the sun and journalists who asked me what I’d like to see in my Christmas stocking and did I sleep nude?

  KATE exits. COLIN stands by himself. We hear the noise of cocktail party chatter. MIKE McCORD approaches him. MIKE is a smartly-dressed man about the same age as COLIN. His hair is carefully swept up over his brow in a stylish sweep. His manner is abrupt, authoritative and conspiratorial, conveying the impression that he knows far more than anybody about everything.

  MIKE: Colin Rogers?

  COLIN: [awkwardly] That’s right.

  MIKE: Mike McCord. Welcome to Sydney.

  COLIN: Thanks.

  MIKE: Seen any of his films?

  COLIN: [not understanding] Sorry?

  MIKE: [inclining his head] Our guest. The Hun.

  COLIN: No.

  MIKE: Don’t rush. Best he’s ever done is win a jury prize at the Dublin Film Festival, which places his talent pretty exactly.

  COLIN smiles and shakes his head.

  COLIN: Dublin.

  MIKE: None of his films have ever made a cent, so what does our Film Commission do? Throws a cocktail party for him.

  COLIN: I don’t usually go to these things. Hate ’em.

  MIKE: Go to all the cocktail parties. Golden rule of Sydney life. Only time you ever learn anything. There are the McElroy brothers over there. Only non-identical twins you can’t tell apart. Saw one of your old movies on video last weekend.

  COLIN: [steeling himself against possible criticism] Ah. Which one?

  MIKE: Days of Wine and Whitlam.

  COLIN: Ah.

  MIKE: Enjoyed it. Can’t work out why the critics were so savage.

  COLIN: [tense] Most of the crits were very good.

  MIKE: [shrugging] Must have read one of the bad ones. No, I enjoyed it. Good entertainment.

  COLIN: [bristling] A little more than that, I hope.

  MIKE: End was a bit of a worry. I would’ve been inclined to tie up the loose ends.

  COLIN: [curtly] Loose ends were symptomatic of the times. You write yourself, do you?

  MIKE: Got some projects on the boil. Yep.

  COLIN: What sort of projects?

  MIKE: Contemporary action-adventure. Right for today’s market.

  COLIN: [tight-lipped] That’s what we all should be writing then, is it? Contemporary action-adventure.

  MIKE misses the sarcasm.

  MIKE: [nodding] Look around you. Yesterday’s men. Cranking out pictures that nobody wants to see anymore. Slow pans over the vast outback. Pretty pictures. No action. No drama. It’s about time we woke up to the fact that the little bit of history we’ve had has been so bloody dull there’s no point trying to mythologise it. We’ve got to start making films that are hard-hitting, contemporary and international. Movies that’ll work all over the world. What are you working on?

  COLIN: [reluctantly] Another script.

  MIKE: Is it going to be contemporary?

  COLIN: Recent history.

  MIKE: Given up on the middle classes?

  COLIN: [defensively] I feel like a change.

  MIKE: Elaine Ross producing?

  COLIN: I imagine so.

  MIKE: Haven’t asked her yet?

  COLIN: Not yet… No.

  MIKE: Ever thought of producing your own scripts?

  COLIN: It’s hard enough to write them.

  MIKE: Worth considering. More money, greater artistic control.

  COLIN: Elaine’s always done my scripts well.

  MIKE rocks his head backwards and forwards, indicating that he’s not sure he agrees.

  You don’t think so?

  MIKE: If you’re happy, fine. Got a project I’d like to talk to you about. Got an hour or so next week?

  COLIN: [to the audience] What I should have said was, ‘No! Not this week, next week or any other week.’ The man was patently a hustler and a spectacularly insensitive human being. It was the confidence and assurance that made me hesitate. In my defence, it’s an industry in which today’s joke is tomorrow’s genius. Lucas, Spielberg—laughed at by the studios when they first did the rounds. Who knows where the next hot project is going to emerge from? And it was only a few minutes of my time. [To MIKE] Sure.

  MIKE: [fishing for a notebook] I’ll get your number.

  MIKE takes the number and exits. COLIN stands staring ahead, deep in thought. KATE enters.

>   KATE: How was the cocktail party?

  COLIN: Appalling. Last time I go to one of those. Everyone in the room knew who I was, but not one of them came across to say hello. I don’t expect anyone to genuflect, but I do happen to be the screenwriter with the best track record in the country and not one of them came and said hello.

  KATE: You can look a bit… unapproachable. Why didn’t you walk up and introduce yourself?

  COLIN: I hate imposing myself. I hate the humiliation of having to loom.

  He acts himself looming. KATE smiles.

  Standing there with your facial muscles going rigid around a forced smile, blood freezing in your veins as you wait at the edge of a conversation for the circle to widen—until finally you croak, ‘Mind if I join you’, and everybody looks at you as if you’d just farted. Why are Australians so bloody graceless? Why can’t we occasionally show a little social tact and flair?

  KATE: You’re too sensitive, Colin. A dozen people probably wanted to talk to you, but were just as nervous about approaching you as you were about them.

  COLIN: [gloomily] If you do make the effort and approach someone, it inevitably turns out to be the most boring person in the room, and you’re stuck. If you leave too soon they’ll know you think they’re boring, and if you stay, they catch you glancing desperately over their shoulder and say, ‘I’m boring you, aren’t I?’, and you shriek, ‘No!’, and you’re stuck for another hour. I find mass social intercourse a total mystery. Nobody likes it but it keeps on happening.

  KATE: [smiling] Colin, you’re so inept. All you’ve got to do is say, ‘Ah, there’s Dennis: catch up with you later’. Being scrupulously polite to all people at all times makes you just as many enemies as being rude.

  COLIN: The only guy that did come and talk to me was some aging shyster who script edits soap operas.

  KATE: What did he want?

  COLIN: He’s trying to get a project up.

  KATE: And he wants you to write it?

  COLIN: I expect so.

  KATE: You’re not going to talk to him about it?

  COLIN: Won’t do any harm. There’s just an odd chance it might be brilliant.

  KATE: [reprovingly] Colin!

  COLIN: [irritated] There’s no harm in talking to the man. Don’t you think I can look after myself?