Female of the Species

The Female of the Species by Joanna Murray-Smith, directed by Patrick Nolan. Designed by Dale Ferguson, lighting by Matt Scott, composer David Chesworth. With Michael Carman, Roz Hammond, Peter Houghton, Sue Ingleton, Bert Labonte and Bojana Novakovic. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Victorian Arts Centre Playhouse, until September 30

In the mutual loathing stakes, Joanna Murray-Smith and I, who are exact contemporaries, go back a long way. For around 15 years, she has considered me a bitch and I have thought her a dill. I hated her plays, she hated my criticism. She called herself post-feminist and berated feminism for her problems: I called myself a feminist and thought her a privileged whinger. Even our hair colour expresses our disagreements: she's blonde, I'm brunette.

Once, at the old Playbox Theatre, we sat directly opposite each other at lunch and snubbed each other as only women can. Face to face for more than an hour, we spoke not one word to each other. Not even a gritted greeting.

So I suppose all my friends will be rushing over to take my temperature. This week I went to see Murray-Smith's most recent play, The Female of the Species, and didn't come out breathing fire or wanting to kill. Did my brush with death last week make me a wiser, kinder person? Or have all these drugs numbed my aesthetic perceptions?

Sadly for the moralists, I don't think that suffering has made me more generous. Nor, despite a certain giddy feeling, do I think that the drugs have much to do with it. My theory is that Murray-Smith has put away self-pity for the cruel pleasures of revenge, and in the process has discovered that she's really a comedian.

The Female of the Species is, supposedly, Murray-Smith's take on the legacy of Germaine Greer. As an intellectual argument, don't even think about it. Murray-Smith's feisty, foul-mouthed, charmingly arrogant celebrity feminist Margot Mason may, thanks to a champagne performance by Sue Ingleton, look and sound uncannily like Greer, but there is in fact no resemblance between the intellectual fiction and the fact. The plot too, such as it is, borrows from a real event - the invasion of Greer's Essex home by a disturbed student - but departs from it almost at once.

Margot Mason is working on a deadline for her latest book when a young woman, Molly Rivers (Bojana Novakovic) turns up with a gun and handcuffs Mason to her desk. Molly wants to shoot Mason, because she blames her for warping her mother's mind and ruining her life with her hit book The Cerebral Vagina. First, following Mason's advice, Molly's mother gave her away as a baby so she wouldn't be enslaved by motherhood. Then she jumped under a train clutching The Cerebral Vagina to her breast. Finally, in order to preserve her creativity Molly has sterilised herself so she can't have children, only to be told by Mason that she has no talent at all.

Then Margot's daughter Tess (Roz Hammond), who has embraced the full-time mother and housewife gig and, according to her mother, thrown away everything that was interesting about herself, stumbles through the French windows in her muddied pyjamas. She has blown a fuse after spending all night building a model cinema in balsa wood for a school project. When she sees Molly Rivers waving a gun around, she is in full agreement; her mother ought to be shot.

What follows is an increasingly improbable collection of people having increasingly absurd arguments, with all the classic farcical shifts of power and various revelations, including a nod to the identity questions in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Finally there are six characters on stage - the three women, plus Tess' emasculated SNAG husband Bryan (played with dazed charm by Peter Houghton), the virile ethnic taxi driver Frank Pecorini (Bert Labonte) and Margot Mason's over-the-top gay publisher, Theo (Michael Carman).

The Female of the Species is Murray-Smith's first full-length comic play, and is written in that most unforgiving form, the farce. A farce is a kind of glittering theatrical machine with a murderous clockwork logic that must be wound up tightly in the first scene. The rest of the play simply plays out the theatrical kinetics. In the best farces - Michael Frayn's Noises Off, Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw or The Importance of Being Earnest - the machinery is unobstrusive, exerting its necessity with a kind of deus ex machina inevitability.

Murray-Smith is not quite this skilled, and you can see some of the joins. The energy of the play begins to run down perhaps about two thirds of the way through, and the monologues that turn up around then are not a substitute for action. Every now and then Murray-Smith also falls into the temptation of making what sounds suspiciously like a serious statement ("Sexism these days is subverted by irony"; "men aren't our problem; old feminists are"). I wish she wouldn't. When she leaves her characters unencumbered by credibility or meaning, permitting them to be recognisably sharp caricatures, the satire can be deadly: but the slightest sense of earnestness or moralising dulls its edge.

This is a fine production, with an elegantly practical design by Dale Ferguson which effectively updates the classic farce design from the English Edwardian stage: exits to right and left and (of course) French windows. I particularly liked Matt Scott's subtle lighting, which luminously and unobstrusively shifted the stage time from morning to night. And, of course, a large part of the charm of the evening is the cast, who under Patrick Nolan's assured direction seem to be having a ball. All of them have good lines, and they play their absurdities with the requisite self-blindness, the essential innocence, that farce profoundly requires.

People have already said that the laughter in the theatre, which must be music to the MTC finance officer's ears, reminds them of the heyday of David Williamson. I think that Murray-Smith is much funnier than Williamson. Her writing is more fluently intelligent, and she handles dramatic form with a sharper imagination.

And yes, it doesn't do to look too closely at the ideas in this play: despite the putative subject matter, it is not actually about feminism, but about that old comic standby, motherhood. Like a lot of satire, The Female of the Species has a blackly conservative subtext; don't expect any Ortonesque subversion here. The laughter is about recognition and affirmation, and gets no more dangerous than that. Yet. One feels that Murray-Smith's pen could get a lot more wicked, if she let it. I can't help feeling a lively curiosity about what she might do next, if she continues to open this vein.