Life After George

Academics in this age of educational commercialisation will sympathise with Peter George, the radical professor in this new Australian import by Hannie Rayson. Too bad then that Rayson’s overly clever construction is apt to leave the rest of the population low on that or any other emotion for the characters inhabiting the Duchess stage.

With the thrice-married George dead, the women in his life – two ex-wives, the half-his-age final spouse and grown-up daughter – have gathered, along with best mate Duffy (Richard Hope), to sift through the ashes of a dead husband/father/friend and his deader-still philosophies. The piece begins and ends with George’s funeral, and in between, journeys back and forth over the three preceding decades since 1969.

Along the way, there are some interesting ‘thinky’ asides about social nostalgia, the value of higher education and the perceived failures of feminism, radicalism, Marxism and a bunch of other -isms. George himself sets his political stall out early with perhaps the play’s most compelling scene – an excerpt from one of his 1970s university lectures in which he implores his students to question and fornicate in equal measure (“your sexuality is the engine room for a revolution”).

But while such intellectual brainteasers are fine, dramatic questions are thinner on the ground. Did George commit suicide? Was he having an affair? Who was with him in the plane? Who did he really love? These come too slowly and too late to compensate for a slow start. Many are also left frustratingly unanswered, while revelations about others are unsatisfactory, arriving without any foreshadowing.

Then there are those constant to-ings and fro-ings. Peter J Davison‘s greyed-out university office set – with windows and screens opening up a more colourful past of Parisian rooftops and sunny beaches – helps reduce confusion in following the action. And director Michael Blakemore somehow manages to avoid any smack of farce despite the prevalence of slamming doors and swift entrances and exits. But the constant inter-splicing of time periods, characters, monologues and duologues means all the scenes are too brief and superficial to allow any proper emotional engagement.

Which isn’t to say that the cast fail to turn in compelling performances. As always, Stephen Dillane is consummately natural and watchable. Elsewhere, Joanna Pearce as second wife Lindsay is a bundle of ideologically bankrupt, Aussie steel; Cheryl Campbell does frumpy discard number one well; Anna Wilson-Jones is much more than a bit of fluff despite having to play a wifelet named Poppy; and Susannah Wise nails daughter Ana’s agitation while also tickling the ivories.

But the amassed talent is under-utilised, with none of the aforementioned actors getting enough opportunity to stretch out into their characters and show us what they’re really made of. In the end, this play of free love, free thinking and free education is simply too freewheeling to take dramatic root.

– Terri Paddock