Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot, by David Williamson, directed by Simon Phillips. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, until July 12. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot is, as one of David Williamson’s characters might say, a dog.

It’s a dog with one theatrical idea, which is stretched very thin over two and a half hours. And it’s not quite a nice dog. It has the slightly resentful expression of a labrador that might pee on your shoes if you turn your back.

The play is the story of Scarlett O’Hara (Caroline O’Connor), an incompetent waitress in the sort of restaurant that gives Gordon Ramsay conniptions. In between pratfalls, she deals with her mother, a manipulative bully, and sighs with unrequited passion for her boss.

She fills the emptiness in her life with Hollywood movies. That’s the single theatrical idea: Scarlett drifts into Daydream No. 1 and the backstage screen fills with iconic images of a past era, Bogie and Bergman enacting grand passion for those who can merely watch and dream.

The restaurant is staffed by stereotypes – the dumb blonde (Marney McQueen), the testosterone-fuelled wog (Simon Wood), the frustrated chef-artist (Andrew McFarlane), the aging queer (Bob Hornery). Even Scarlett’s mother Maureen (Monica Maughan) is a cliché, drawn from classic tv shows like Steptoe & Son and Mother and Son.

As I sat stonily under a little private cloud in Row F, the audience around me rocked with laughter. What’s the point of cavilling against that? It inevitably seems mean-minded: as the program suggests, it means that you can’t see Williamson in the “right perspective”, and believe that popularity equals lack of seriousness.

But hey, I’m all for the popular. I adored the ingenious theatricality of the MTC’s production of The 39 Steps, which also riffed off classic Hollywood movies. I’m happy to be counted as a member of the Caroline O’Connor fan club. So why not let the laughter ripple on?

Travelling home with my cloud, I pondered why this work doesn’t merely leave me indifferent, but depressed. It’s to do with Williamson’s startling ability to think solely in media-generated stereotypes, and the complacent laughter this elicits from an audience.

In his essay Politics and Language, George Orwell speaks of a decadent English, in which “phrases [are] tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”. “Language,” Orwell warns, “can corrupt thought….Every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of one’s brain.”

Williamson’s entire dramatic craft is prefab: at no point do we see through cliché to real feeling. This makes it insidiously comfortable to laugh at wogs, or footballers raping stupid blondes, or lonely old women.

And that’s depressing.

This review was (I think) in Friday's Australian. I am posting from London, so I can't check, as it's not online. There's no doubt alot more to say about politics and language, and I realise I have scarcely mentioned the production itself - 400 words doesn't leave much room - but Ms TN, ever ready with handy excuses, pleads jetlag. I invite you all to talk among yourselves...