Keyboard Skills
By Lesley Bruce
Ensemble Theatre, Sydney
Until September 20
Honour
by Joanna Murray-Smith
The Wharf, Sydney
Review by Mark Stoyich
Two plays in Sydney at the moment show what some women think of some men. Interestingly, although the styles, locations and plots of the two are completely different, the men are more or less the same (bastards, naturally).
Honour at the Wharf presents the entirely unoriginal situation of a successful man who's hit middle age and decided to leave his wife for a younger woman.
The author, Joanna Murray-Smith, is the daughter of a prominent left-wing Melbourne journalist, and one wonders if the play is autobiographical. The husband in Honour is a notable journalist, and there's a hint he's on the progressive side ("resigned in '75"), but beyond this the outside world doesn't seem to exist. And although the characters are constantly remarking on his brilliance, he never once says or does anything particularly intelligent.
His wife Honour, however, lives up to her name, by turns aggrieved, understanding, insightful and loving. She even understands the woman who steals her husband. She guesses from the beginning the clever, attractive young journalist's psychological weakness and, without acting directly, has her revenge — in a loving, non-vindictive way.
Her daughter, in her 20s but still very much in need of a mother's understanding, accuses her of weakness and hates all three of the other characters.
Julia Blake and Kathryn Hartman are very good as mother and daughter. George Whaley is not so good as the husband, but then his character isn't either. A very wordy play with a bad set that keeps the middle-aged characters standing, or sitting awkwardly on the floor, Honour is the intelligent older woman's revenge fantasy, a non-violent Electra for the 1990s.
In Keyboard Skills, the childish, dishonest husband is a junior cabinet minister, and his wife, aggrieved, understanding, insightful (see above) is his former stenographer, who learned everything she needs to know about taking dictation and helping the male ego delude itself, at Miss Gainsborough's secretarial school.
Sharon Flanagan is especially good as Miss Gainsborough, a gracious relic of a previous era (pre-word processor and pre-feminism), and Josephine Byrnes is perfect as the politician's wife who, bit by bit, gets the awful truth out of her philandering husband.
The play is very English, and the awfulness of British politicians — often connected with sexual irregularities — is rather different from our home-grown awfulness. But here or in Britain, theatre seems to be a place where women get the goods on ambitious men.
Keyboard Skills is a smooth comedy like something good you'd see on TV, while Honour is a more thoughtful piece with more difficult dialogue. But in both plays the female characters seem to have gone backwards from the days of Ibsen's A Doll's House. Nora at least slammed the door on her impossible husband.