Here's to culture, not money
Amy's view
By David Hare
Opera House Drama Theatre
Until April 18
Review by Mark Stoyich
What a joy to see a conventionally structured, naturalistic drama in a traditional theatre after sitting through a week of ritualistic, performance-based, cutting-edge type theatre staged variously in ruined vaudeville houses, Masonic lodge initiation halls, abandoned synagogues or concrete amphitheatres at the Adelaide Festival, where everything was either too loud or inaudible.
Meanwhile, at the Sydney Opera House the punters are thoroughly enjoying (or, in the case of the North Shore subscribers, gently dozing through) Amy's View.
David Hare has become, over the years, Britain's most important political playwright, particularly during the depressing Thatcher years. Now he (as well as, no doubt, the New privatised Labour Party government) is grappling with the fallout of that adventurous period in Britannia's history.
Among the victims of the '80s freed-up marketplace were the "names": investors in Lloyds, who received nice dividends when times were good and then found themselves limitlessly liable for claims made on the insurer when things went wrong.
The heroine of Amy's View is a successful stage actress, Esme Allen, who finds herself one of the victims of Lloyds' collapse. During the course of the play, Esme gradually loses everything, beginning with her daughter Amy, who marries a rising toiler in the culture industry whom Esme dislikes on sight, then her house, filled with her late husband's paintings and which, in a marvellous coup de theatre, literally recedes from Esme into the distance. But Esme never loses her craft, or her real home, which is the theatre.
Sandy Gore is perfect as Esme who, without ever being a Lady Bracknell, is a grande dame with a splendid lack of interest in money matters. Esme admits this has been the cause of her downfall, but refuses to change; above all, she refuses to blame anyone but herself, and she faces her financial ruin without self-pity. As long as there's theatre, there's hope.
Amy walks out on her mother in dismay and despair at her wilful lack of concern for herself. Esme is an old-fashioned character, and she's given her contrast in the character of her son-in-law Dominic, a bastard who deserts Amy and derides Esme as a relic of the past.
Dominic is into whatever's going — postmodernist championing of low culture at the expense of high, fashionable attitudes, violent movies — and needless to say, he's the one left with money.
In a marvellous scene towards the end, he tries to placate Amy's memory by giving her mother a box full of cash (any cheques would go to her creditors). She hardly looks at it, leaving it casually on her dressing table as she goes off to appear on stage. By now Amy is dead, and so is Amy's view that love will conquer all, even the likes of Dominic. But Esme, and the theatre, live on.
The theatre, and what has happened to it in the last two decades, are at least in part the subject of Amy's View. The play begins in the late '70s, with an old-fashioned, realistic set: Esme's comfortable house in the country (becoming a suburb of London). It gives way to the sort of minimalist set we're used to now: Esme's dressing-room in the small experimental theatre where she's reviving her career in the '90s.
At the end, Amy's View even looks forward to the future — the theatre's and ours — as Esme enters a sort of high-tech Garden of Eden with herself as Eve and a young fellow actor as Adam.
The sudden appearance of laser technology could have been inappropriate, spectacular but pointless, if it didn't sum up all that's gone before. I doubt that the future of theatre is in high tech, but I'm sure it has a future, and so (we'd better hope) do theatrical personalities like Esme, who don't give a damn about money but care everything about culture.