This spirited MTC/Queensland Theatre co-production, directed by Sam Strong, marks both Williamson’s retirement from playwriting and fifty years since the appearance of his first play, The Coming of Stork, at Melbourne’s La Mama theatre. It’s a welcome celebration of Williamson’s contribution to the Australian theatre landscape.

During the peak of his influence – a period that arguably began with The Perfectionist (STC, 1981) and ran until at least The Heretic (STC, 1996) – the prospect of a new Williamson play was as highly anticipated as the annual Shakespeare or Chekhov, or the latest smash-hit from Britain. His plays not only distilled some of the formative debates we were undergoing as a nation – political corruption, financial recession, gender politics, sexual harassment – they also carved out a giant space on Australian stages for Australian stories, a space that has since been occupied by writers such as Joanna Murray-Smith, Hannie Rayson, and Nakkiah Lui.

Jason Klarwein and Fiona Garner in Emerald City (photograph by Jeff Busby)

In Emerald City, Williamson has a number of targets in his sights: artistic integrity, left-wing sanctimony, cultural appropriation, and the age-old rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. At the centre of the play are Colin and Kate, a married couple who have just made the move from Melbourne to Sydney, and who are slowly adjusting to life in ‘the pulsing, garish city to the north’.

Bristly, no-nonsense Kate (Nadine Garner) works in publishing: she’s discovered an Indigenous writer whose book, Black Rage, she longs to publish, but her boss is having none of it. Colin (Jason Klarwein) is a screenwriter. His last movie, Days of Wine and Whitlam, was a critical success, though it failed at the box office. He’s on shaky ground with his producer, Elaine (Marg Downey at her imperious best). She wants him to write the story of a father fighting criminal property developers; he wants to develop a screenplay about coastwatchers during World War II. Elaine’s response: ‘Why in the hell would Mr and Mrs Western Suburbs want to watch that shit?’

Things go fully off the rails for Colin when he meets Mike McCord (Rhys Muldoon), a film writer/producer wannabe, who plays to Colin’s ‘monumental insecurity’, tempting him with fame, riches, and the ultimate Sydney dream: a harbour view. While Colin’s career slumps, Kate finds herself with a Booker-shortlisted author on her hands, not to mention the opportunity to sell the rights to Black Rage to the highest bidder.

Where Williamson excels as a writer is in the way he ruthlessly but comically exposes the hypocrisies of his characters: Colin’s willingness to compromise his vision in order to get big money and big audiences; left-wing Kate’s sidelining of the public-school system in order to give her daughter the advantages of a private-school education. If the way Williamson gets all sides of a competing debate into a room together sometimes seems contrived, he still has an unparalleled knack of focusing the BBQ-stopper conversations of the day. There are plenty of laughs to be had (although jokes that in their day would have cut as sharp as glass have, over time, lost some of their edge).

Strong directs at a cracking pace. The actors and the revolving set are in almost constant motion, a brisk choreography that sustains the play’s momentum even through some of its blander passages. (Had the play been written now, the unconvincing infidelity subplots are unlikely to have made the final cut.) It’s all enlivened by subtle, yet stylish costume designs – with a cute nod to Kylie’s infamous ‘noughts-and-crosses’ dress – and an abstract, translucent set that sparkles and glistens like Sydney harbour on a perfect day. David Walters did the lighting; Dale Ferguson the set and costumes.

Rhys Muldoon and Megan Hind in Emerald City (photograph by Jeff Busby)

The performances are almost uniformly strong. Nadine Garner is proving herself to be one of Australia’s most versatile and engaging stage actors, and she doesn’t disappoint here. Her Kate is whip-smart and intense, and the shifts in her attitudes – towards Sydney and its pretensions – come across as perfectly credible. Jason Klarwein’s Colin is suitably pliable and pathetic, his fragile ego easy prey to Mike’s ambitions. There’s something ‘ScoMo’-like about Rhys Muldoon’s pinpoint portrayal of Mike, the man endlessly working the room, promising the world but never delivering. In the minor role of Mike’s financier, Malcolm, Ray Chong Nee is appropriately supercilious (although he’s too good an actor to have so little to do).

The only weakness is Megan Hind in the thankless role of Helen. It’s perhaps a measure of how far we have progressed as a society that a subplot in which a young woman’s only function is to lead our hero (sexually) astray elicits noticeable unease and impatience in an audience. Few actors would be able to overcome such a handicap.

Emerald City is a play that spoke emphatically to its time, and it still has much to say. While certain aspects feel dated – the denigration of television in the age of Netflix and HBO seems quaint; and, harbour views aside, the differences between Melbourne and Sydney possibly aren’t as sharp as they once were – others continue to resonate. We’re still fighting to tell our own stories, and to protect Australian content on Australian screens. And we’re still sacrificing our ideals and our integrity in the name of fame, fortune, and real estate. 

Revisiting Emerald City demonstrates how much we’ve changed as a country and, crucially, how much we’ve stayed the same. What no one might have expected is the degree to which, over the last thirty years, the Mike McCords of the world – the blustering, vacant showmen – have not merely survived, but flourished.

Emerald City, an MTC/Queensland Theatre co-production, is playing at the Sumner Theatre until 18 April 2020. Performance attended: March 11.