Dear Sir.

I am more than puzzled by Dr Elizabeth Lawson’s review of Roland Robinson’s Selected Poems in the November ABR. I would have thought and it appears quite plain to other readers that the purpose of my introductory remarks in that volume was to argue for a re-evaluation of Roland Robinson on fresh grounds. To this end, I did not approach his work ‘chiefly through its Jindyworobak origins and affiliations’, but from a modernist and imagist consideration. The purpose was to make a break with the usual cliches about the Jindyworobaks and present Robinson's work on its own merits – however much they disagree with fans of Peter Porter.

Yours faithfully,

Michael Sharkey.

Toowoomba. Q.

Dear Sir,

I have just read Mary Lord’s review of the Currency Press publication, David Williamson's The Perfectionist (in ABR Sept. 1983).

While Lord is sympathetic to the play, she has over-emphasized some aspects of it and overlooked others. My arguments are based on a viewing of the excellent Canberra production of The Perfectionist earlier this year; I have not read the published text. It is an important, very balanced play and worthy of considerable discussion.

While it undoubtedly ‘examines ... modern marriage’, it is misleading to state that ‘the story unfolds from the woman's point of view’. The woman Barbara’s point of view is obvious and most people have applauded this; but the man Stuart's point of view is also strongly presented. For this is precisely The Perfectionist's strength: it does not take a lopsided point of view. It does not accuse only the young husband of being a perfectionist and therefore an inadequate partner in the marriage.

So much contemporary drama and fiction focusses tediously and repetitiously on woman's wrongs that today even a wronged woman may find herself bored silly by the subject as a theme for art.

The opening scenes of Williamson’s play appear to promise the usual mix: intelligent, inquiring wife is, understandably, fed up with minding the children; while ambitious, preoccupied husband relentlessly pursues academic success. Inequality Thy Name Is Woman! sighs the audience, thankfully preparing to keep its collective mind comfortably closed. But the play moves on from this easily recognizable theme so well established in the opening scenes. And it proceeds to test its heroine’s feminist contentions by calling her bluff.

The husband, at first so single-minded and relentless, is in fact open to his wife's increasingly drastic criticisms. He listens, responds, abandons his thesis and, by taking over the lion's share of the domestic duties, assists the wife to prepare her own Ph.D.

Important things now happen. The wife discovers a bit of yellowing in the grass on the other side of the fence: she comes to realize her own procrastinating failure to finish her thesis; she misses the old, close contact with her children; she discovers a certain shallowness in her young lover. Once again she starts to criticize her situation and her husband’s new set of deficiencies. He's now doing too much in the house and doing it badly; she is left out of all the decision making on the domestic scene.

The wife attacks not only her own reformed set-up, but also that of her in-laws. apparently happily married. She wades into her father-in-law's ambition, egotism, and exploitation of his wife. She wades into the alcoholism of her mother-in-law. All very imperfect.

But here, near the end of the play, Williamson has placed one of its key scenes. The parents-in-law are not grateful for these scathing insights. The insights are not actually news to them. They have long understood each other’s weaknesses, and accommodated them, in the interests of continuing their long lasting, tolerant and mutually supportive marriage. It seems they wish to continue to look after each other.

The carping younger wife continues her discontented tirades into the closing scenes of the play while her born-again feminist husband urges her to come back to him and the children.

Barbara, originally such a sympathetic figure, has now, due to the author’s ironic presentation of her role, come to sound like a nagging bitch who will never be satisfied; she's hooked on complaint. It is apparent that she, as much as, or more than her husband, is a boring perfectionist. In the final scene on the park bench both husband and wife tentatively move towards a recognition that all they probably have to go on with is something less than the ideal.

To ignore the perfectionist nature of the wife in this play, as many people have, is to ignore the very effective movement of the play away from a slick, stereotypical view of modern marriage and towards deeper meanings. Tolerance rather than any overworked feminist message is the moral that the play asserts.

It is a brilliant achievement that combines Williamson’s well known facility for showing us how we are now, and were over the last decade, with a more profound and realistic comment on enduring human dilemmas.

Yours sincerely,

Suzanne Edgar,

Garran, ACT.