Friday – SITCO

Overview

As I write this, the electoral rolls for the 2013 Federal Election have just closed. If you’re not enrolled to vote, you won’t get the chance to have your say in a contest between a pompous, prancing pony and Tony Abbott, and you may not even care. You may think — and you may even be right — that Australian politics is a bit of a joke. You'd certainly not be alone in thinking that 'choice' is pretty thin on the ground, and that the main players seem more intent on distracting us with shiny promises of free money than actual discussion about the future of our nation. Policy might be a serious business, but Australian politics is barely a farce.

Enter onto this stage riddled with electoral disenchantment Daniela Giorgi's new play Friday, about a "fictitious parliament" battling with some all-too-familiar woes: journalists more interested in gossip than policy, an opposition opposed to any and all public infrastructure, dark personal histories of ministers coming back to haunt them, competing egos, Question Time sessions that descend into sledging matches.

The Minister for Transport wants to make all public transport free, but the Leader of the Opposition doesn't like the sound of the great big new tax that might entail, and besides, he knows the Minister is a fraud and a traitor to boot. Accusations are flung, recriminations are had, resurrections of all kinds experienced as Giorgi's cast of characters (directed by Julie Baz) push the limits of probability in a parliament that feels strangely like several we have known and yet seems to obey no recognisable laws or rules.

Friday is ambitious and admirable in its intent (according to Giorgi's program note) "to suggest that […] the democratic revolution is not over, and that it will never be over". But it falls short in almost every respect. It is not close enough to reality to document our experience, but it is not enough removed from our world to provide instruction through allegory. Where it attempts to satirise, it lands only cheap gags; where it attempts civic education, it seems to lack basis in fact or research. The acting style is not fast-paced enough to carry the broad, archetypal, almost melodramatic characters and storylines, and the storylines themselves are so multitudinous as to become implausible and unsatisfying.

Friday attempts to redress a kind of terminal malaise in (not just) Australian public life: apathy. By pointing towards the ways in which public debate is often sidetracked and corrupted by vested interests, it hopes to create a more engaged constituency — that's us, the audience. But Friday simply left me feeling aggravated by inconsistencies and an insinuation that it's those nasty (non-theatre-attending) philistines who have led to our parlous state of national debate.

There's something strangely exclusive, almost nihilistic about the play's overhanging mood of despondency about voters and their (sorry, our) apparently base instincts and inability to discern facts. It's all very well to turn citizen misinformation and apathy into a few good sketches — and goodness knows there are some brilliant one-liners in here — but it doesn’t actually do anything to redress the problem.

Voters, much like theatre audiences, tend to be smarter than they (we!) are credited. Save yourself an evening of being patronised, and read some topnotch political journalism instead.