Emerald City

by David Williamson

  COLIN: What?

  KATE: You came to Sydney an artist, and you’re turning into a businessman.

  COLIN: We just made art and nobody watched.

  KATE: I think it’s very sad.

  COLIN: If being an artist means that you have to starve, then I don’t want to be an artist!

  He walks away and there’s an awkward silence. HELEN enters the room behind them.

  HELEN: Hi there. Sorry I’m late.

  MIKE: Hi, honey. This is Colin and Kate.

  HELEN: Hi. Doesn’t exactly seem to be a celebration going on in here. What were the figures?

  MIKE: Thirteen.

  HELEN: Oh migod. The series wasn’t that bad?

  KATE: [incensed] The series was good. Too good.

  HELEN: [embarrassed] I meant in commercial terms. It wasn’t very commercial.

  KATE: Who cares? I am publishing a book that will be lucky to sell a few thousand copies, but it’s an important and passionate book and its long-term influence will be enormous!

  HELEN: [not aggressively] You’re lucky. You still get your weekly pay cheque no matter how many it sells. Mike and Colin only get paid if they get results.

  KATE: Colin has been getting results. Not enough to make him a millionaire, but until very recently he never wanted that. What good is money? What can you do with it? Buy a house with a better view? Go for another trip to Venice?

  HELEN: [without malice] I’d like to go on my first trip to Venice. I wouldn’t say ‘No’ to a house with a better view, either. All we see out of our bedroom window is a twenty-foot-high baby wearing Dri Tots.

  KATE: [to the audience] She was exactly what I expected. A carefully packaged and presented material girl of the eighties. A blow-waved, brittle dolly bird. Totally self-obsessed and convinced that the trinkets of affluence were the ultimate prizes of life.

  COLIN: [to the audience] My first reaction was that this couldn’t be right. This vision—this ravishing, mind-scrambling beauty can’t belong to Mike. The gods are unjust, but surely not that unjust. I flattered myself that I was a progressive male, totally opposed to reducing women to sex objects, but Helen was a walking male fantasy. I focussed all my powers of imagination on what she’d look like without clothes on, felt ashamed of myself, and by way of compensation, fell desperately in love.

  KATE: [to COLIN] Well, you’re going to have to decide.

  COLIN: [snapping out of it] Decide what?

  KATE: Between art and money.

  COLIN: Surely they’re not always mutually excited—sorry, mutually exclusive. Why did I say excited?

  HELEN: [to the audience] Because he was. By me. I liked that, and I liked the fact that he was subtle about it too. He didn’t stare at my tits as if they were choc chip ice-creams like most of them do. I found him very attractive and thought that if I could ever shake myself free of brainless for a weekend or two it could be exciting. I wouldn’t’ve felt the least bit guilty about his wife either. What a dragon. I thought that if that’s what Melbourne does to you, thank God I’ve never been there. [To COLIN] Shakespeare.

  KATE: Shakespeare what?

  HELEN: He was an artist who made money.

  KATE: Shakespeare made money? Surely not.

  HELEN: He owned five houses. He died a wealthy man.

  MIKE: [to the audience] The only trouble with that broad of mine is that she never knows when to shut up. That bloody wife of Colin’s was going to put the hard word on Colin to ditch me as soon as possible and Helen makes the situation worse by starting to pick a fight. After putting all that hard slog into the ‘Coastwatcher’ fiasco, there was no way I was going to let go until we got ourselves a smash hit. After that he could write art until his balls dropped off.

  KATE: If Shakespeare were alive today, I’m sure he wouldn’t be writing ‘Dallas’.

  MIKE goes into contortions and belches.

  Is something wrong?

  MIKE: Stomach’s playing up again.

  COLIN: We’d better go.

  MIKE: Sorry about this. Like a tame tiger snake. Never know when it’s going to strike.

  COLIN: Thanks for your hospitality.

  MIKE: Only wish the news had’ve been better.

  HELEN: Bye, Kate. Bye, Colin.

  COLIN: [to the audience] I felt the deft touch of her fingers and the breath of her voice in my ear. I felt chemistry between us that would make Sarah Miles and her stiff-legged lover look jaded.

  MIKE and HELEN exit. COLIN and KATE stand outside the house. COLIN tries to hail a cab.

  KATE: I hope I never have to meet those two socially again.

  COLIN: They’re not that bad.

  COLIN looks at KATE, grits his teeth, misses another taxi and stares straight ahead.

  KATE: Colin, I’m shocked. Really shocked.

  COLIN: [truculently] At what?

  KATE: I’m shocked that you’re going into a continuing relationship with that man and talking seriously about producing soap opera.

  COLIN: We’re not going to produce soap opera.

  KATE: Colin, what’s happening to you?

  COLIN: [suddenly, passionately] What’s happening is that I’m getting older and I’m starting to have the nightmare that every writer gets: ending my life as a deadbeat, flogging scripts to producers who don’t want ’em. And it’s not paranoia. It happens. Henry Lawson was sent to jail because he couldn’t pay his debts. Ended his life begging in the streets of Sydney and did anyone care? Not one. He’d be really amused today if he could see his head on our ten-dollar note. Cultural hero—kids study him in schools—ended his life as a joke and nobody cared! It’s not going to happen to me. I’m sick of sending scripts off and waiting patiently for the call that never comes and ringing back and ringing back and finally getting someone on the other end of the phone who says, ‘Sorry’, they haven’t had time to read it yet. Being a writer is one of the most humiliating professions on earth and I’m sick to death of it. I want to be a producer, and I want to have money, and I want to have power. I want to sit in my office with people phoning me. I want to sit back and tell my secretary that I’m in conference and can’t be disturbed and that I’ll ring back, then make sure I never do. I want scripts to come to me, and I’ll make the judgements about whether they’re good, bad or indifferent. I’ll be the one with the blue pencil who rips other people’s scripts apart, complains about the banality and predictability, groans at the clichéd dialogue, mutters, ‘There must be some good writers somewhere’. Why shouldn’t I have money and power? Why shouldn’t I have a great big house on the waterfront like all the rest of the coked-out mumblers out there masquerading as producers? I want you to stop telling people what I want out of my life, because you are wrong! I don’t want to make art films or films with a message, I want to produce a product that entertains and I want it to make me awesomely powerful and fabulously rich!

  END OF ACT ONE

  ACT TWO

  KATE and COLIN arrive home.

  KATE: Awesomely powerful and fabulously rich?

  COLIN: Yes.

  KATE: Colin, I can understand your anxieties, but this isn’t the way to handle them. You mustn’t compromise your integrity.

  COLIN: Of course, you’ve never compromised your integrity, have you?

  KATE: No.

  COLIN: No. Your boss told me he was enormously pleased with the ethnic cookbook series you’ve initiated.

  KATE: [embarrassed] That’s just to give me commercial credibility, so I can do the books I really want to, like Black Rage.

  COLIN: He told me that the South-East Asian section breaks new ground. What have you got? Fretilin-style snacks for eating on the run? And which one of us insisted on ferreting our daughter through a seventy-year waiting list into the most exclusive girls school in Sydney? Where all her friends live within half a mile of each other in Bellevue Hill, and where she’s already planning to graduate at twenty-one, marry at twenty-seven, have two daughters named Francesca and Chloe, divorce her husband
at thirty-two and recommence her stockbroking career.

  KATE: We couldn’t send her to a state school. They’re appalling. The system has almost broken down.

  COLIN: The state school system is not nearly as appalling as guilty socialist mothers who know they shouldn’t be stuffing their kids into top private schools would like to believe.

  KATE: You went along with it. You came and grovelled in front of the headmistress.

  COLIN: I wasn’t as low on my belly as you were. [Imitating KATE] ‘I’ve been amazed, simply amazed at how many people have told me how excellent this school is.’ Grovel, grovel. ‘I’d be so happy if I thought my daughter was being educated in such a stimulating intellectual environment.’

  KATE: That’s really unfair, Colin. It is an excellent school academically and if it has got her thinking in terms of career independence—

  COLIN: [interrupting] Career independence? It’s turning her into a predatory neo-feminist socialite. She and her friends know the name of every eligible private schoolboy in Sydney. They swap descriptions and wealth assessments of ones they’ve never even met. Australia a classless society? There’s selective breeding out there in the Eastern Suburbs that would make our pedigree stud farms look like amateurs, and our daughter is in the thick of it. Do you know that she hasn’t met one boy who goes to a state school since she came to Sydney? I said to her, ‘Do you realise that I went to a state school? If I was your age you would never have met me.’ She said, ‘Good’.

  KATE: If you feel so strongly about it, take her out of there.

  COLIN: She’s settled in. She likes it.

  KATE: And you like it too, if the truth be known. State schoolboy’s daughter gets to top private school.

  COLIN: I am riddled with compromise and ambivalence. At least I admit it.

  KATE: My primary purpose in sending her there was to give her a good education!

  COLIN: You rage at the fact that thousands in this city are homeless, yet you send your daughter to be educated in an atmosphere that’ll teach her not to give a damn!

  KATE: [angrily, defensively] Take her out of there then.

  COLIN: You take her out. You’re supposed to be the one with the social conscience!

  KATE: She’ll see through all that phony Bellevue Hill stuff.

  COLIN: You want her there because it’s a top private school too. You’re one of that vast army of fake altruists who condemn the filthy rich and mouth platitudes about the sufferings of the underprivileged, then go along and collect their fat pay cheques every week and never do a damn thing about it. Well, I’ve stopped pretending. I’m going to be a producer and become enormously powerful and disgustingly rich!

  KATE: If I wasn’t so appalled, I’d laugh.

  COLIN: Would you? Why?

  KATE: You can’t even do the shopping without forgetting half of it.

  COLIN: What’s that got to do with it?

  KATE: You forget my birthday, the kids’ birthdays, and every second appointment you make.

  COLIN: Producing involves more than attention to petty detail.

  KATE: That’s got to be part of it, surely?

  COLIN: It’s picking the right projects. Knowing scripts.

  KATE: The kids have got to repeat every question they ask you because you’re off in another world. Our credit cards are always bouncing and we’re always about to lose either the telephone, electricity or the gas because you never remember to pay. You had to hire a line producer on ‘Coastwatchers’ to get you out of the mess.

  COLIN: It was just inexperience.

  KATE: That fiasco over the extras—

  COLIN: [interrupting] I wrote ‘Forty Japanese burst from the clearing’. Mike got it wrong.

  KATE: Most producers would have spotted the error before a chartered Jumbo with four hundred extras arrived from Tokyo. Colin, you just haven’t got the right temperament to be a producer. You turned grey during ‘Coastwatchers’ and I couldn’t sleep at night because you were rotating like a corkscrew, shouting abuse at Mike in your sleep.

  COLIN: He’s the reason we had to get a line producer. Never did a bloody thing.

  KATE: And you’re going to work with him again?

  COLIN: He’d better shape up this time and he knows it.

  KATE: You’ve spoken to him?

  COLIN: He knows it. He knows I’m not happy.

  KATE: Colin, I know when you’re not happy. You tap your right foot and clench your right fist, but it’s taken eighteen years of marriage to spot the signals. Mike is so insensitive he’d be hard-put to spot the irritation on the face of a charging tiger.

  COLIN: He knows I’m not happy.

  KATE: Colin, I wish you’d look at the situation honestly. Mike’s a downmarket hustler and you’re a writer. You might end up begging on the streets of Sydney but it’s a chance you’re going to have to take. You’re absent-minded and vague because your brain’s always away somewhere else working on plot lines and dialogue. You wake up at night and tell me stories you’ve dreamt. You mustn’t try and be what you’re not.

  COLIN: Stick in the same old rut. Let yourself be kicked from pillar to post.

  KATE: You can’t do something that’s not in your nature.

  COLIN: I’ll decide what my nature is, not you.

  KATE: A producer has to be ruthless.

  COLIN: I can be ruthless. I’m going to be the most ruthless bastard in this city.

  KATE: Colin, you’re about as ruthless as a toothless old pussycat.

  COLIN: You’re wrong. I’m going to be so ruthless you wouldn’t believe.

  KATE exits and MIKE enters. COLIN sits and listens to MIKE. They’re at Mike’s place.

  MIKE: Right. There’s these two undercover cops in Darlinghurst. Prostitutes, drugs—all of that sort of stuff going on around them. These aren’t your typical cops. These guys are young, spunky, wear the latest fashions and the art direction gives us everything in pastel shades and there’s a lot of action and car chases and a rock soundtrack.

  COLIN: You’re three years too late. That’s ‘Miami Vice’.

  MIKE: No, it’s different.

  COLIN: How’s it different?

  Pause.

  MIKE: Right. There’s this career woman, divorced with a young kid. She gets someone in to housekeep and he’s a guy and he’s got a kid—

  COLIN: [interrupting] Where’d that come from?

  MIKE: There’s a show a bit similar in the States, but this’ll be set in Australia.

  COLIN: Mike, we have to do something original.

  MIKE: There’s nothing new under the sun, mate. All we can do is add a new twist.

  COLIN: I don’t believe that.

  MIKE: A series about a DJ.

  COLIN: Sitting there playing records?

  MIKE: Things are always happening. A gang of Arab terrorists fly in and take over the station.

  COLIN: Why would Arab terrorists endure the horrors of a twenty-four-hour Qantas flight to take over 2GB?

  MIKE: [ignoring the jibe] They take the DJ hostage and start making demands.

  COLIN: No more talkback? Get rid of John Laws?

  MIKE: [tensely, under pressure] Release of Arab prisoners.

  COLIN: Why are we holding Arab prisoners?

  MIKE: We can plug the holes in the plot later. It’s the concept.

  COLIN: The concept’s lousy. We’ve got to come up with an idea that’s brilliantly original and commercial. We can’t afford another lemon like ‘Coastwatchers’.

  HELEN enters the room looking tantalisingly sexy. COLIN tries to disguise his interest, but finds it hard not to stare at her.

  HELEN: Working late?

  MIKE: Two coffees, love.

  HELEN: [to COLIN] Black with one sugar?

  COLIN: Please.

  HELEN: No, it’s not. It’s black with no sugar, isn’t it?

  COLIN: It is actually. I wasn’t thinking.

  HELEN: Head like a sieve. I can never remember things like that.


  COLIN: Neither can I.

  HELEN: Names too. I’m hopeless with names.

  COLIN: So am I. Introductions are a nightmare.

  HELEN: Really? You always look so assured and confident.

  COLIN: Me?

  HELEN: When you get one of your awards or something on TV.

  COLIN: Shaking like a jelly.

  HELEN: There’s hope for me.

  MIKE: How’d it go today?

  HELEN: Disaster.

  She turns to COLIN to explain. During the explanation COLIN doesn’t take in one word. He watches the expressions on her face, transfixed.

  I was hired to organise the publicity for Rod Miki—heard of him?

  COLIN shakes his head.

  Neither had anyone else. He’s a new-wave comedian from LA who’s about as funny as a funeral.

  COLIN: You had a problem.

  HELEN: Did I ever. By the time I picked him up he’d finished his first bottle of whiskey; he tried to get my top off, I hit the car in front and when we got to the first interview he lay on the floor and screamed at the journo to jump on him.

  COLIN: Jump on him?

  HELEN: He said she’d only come to put the boot in—why didn’t she do the job properly?

  MIKE: Jesus!

  HELEN: What was I supposed to do? He was uncontrollable.

  MIKE: You should have told him that the journo thought he was a genius.

  HELEN: It’s a bit hard to spread disinformation when you’re being raped in peak-hour traffic in George Street.

  MIKE: If you didn’t wear gear that opened you for public inspection, you wouldn’t have that sort of problem. Two coffees! Do you think you can do that without getting yourself raped?

  HELEN glares, turns and goes.

  COLIN: [to the audience] Why did she put up with it? She deserved someone sensitive, intelligent—someone who sat and marvelled as the passions passed like summer storms across the face of her beauty. She deserved me, but I didn’t know how to make the offer. In the past I’d been so inept and shy that I always waited for the woman to give the first sign in case I made a fool of myself, but this time it was too urgent for that. I didn’t want to wreck my marriage, I just wanted a heady, passionate affair, but if I made an approach and she refused, she’d be sure to tell Mike, and if she accepted, knowing my luck, Kate would find out and be off to her room in Glebe like a flash. I didn’t know what to do but I knew I had to do something Every time she spoke, every time she did anything including standing stock still, I was overpoweringly attracted.