Who doesn't know "The Club", "The Department", "Travelling North", "The Perfectionist", "The Removalists", "Brilliant Lies", "Don's Party", "Emerald City", "Money and Friends"?
David Williamson just can’t help himself: he has written another Australian play: "The Great Divide", a new comedy with wise-cracking commentary on wealth inequality and human greed. "I felt the urge to write again," he said. "We pretend we're an egalitarian society, but the reality of the Australia we live in now is that it is one of the most unequal developed countries in the world. I thought it's time that I had a look at just what sort of country Australia has become."
Aspiration and avarice, the terrible twins, close bosom cousins of corruption and coercion, take centre stage in "The Great Divide", with Australia’s richest woman determined to develop an environmentally pristine but economically depressed area of the east coast.
The protagonist here is money, made incarnate by Alex Whittle, Australia’s richest woman. Shameless in her win-at-all-costs philosophy, she has set her eye on turning sleepy Wallis Heads, a serf’s paradise, into a playground for the rich and fatuous. Why should the losers, society’s effluent, have the golden beaches, sapphire seas, emerald bush land and diamond days. They belong to the affluent and her conniving cash splash influence will make it so.
She has already secretly bought up tracts of land and has the local council in her pocket. The great divide between the haves and have nots is set to get wider when an unassuming single mum shelf-stacker at the local supermarket decides to take a stand.
I first heard about David Williamson's latest play on Phillip Adams' Late Night Live last night - and so can you now by firmly clicking here.
