New Australian play from Brookman is entertainingly insightful about the country’s diminishing returns.

Belvoir, Sydney
April 6, 2016

The Whitlam generation had it good. Free education. Free love. A free run, particularly if you belonged to the middle-class milieu, to buy your own land well before values soared, where you could build your own home, from which you might pursue previously un-Australian passions such as art and literature and theatre. There, you could raise three children and, when the battering winds of ’80s and ’90s globalism blew forth a new century of inter-generational inequality, let these young adults stay on for a peppercorn rent.

In the present day, writer Judith (Genevieve Picot) and her company-man husband Patrick (Geoff Morrell), who are now about 60, have returned for Christmas from their second home, in Sydney, to the house they built in the Adelaide Hills. Eldest child Lily (Shelly Lauman), a theatre-maker, now lives here, with her loud, self-absorbed playwright husband Michael (Eden Falk). When all three of Judith and Patrick’s children arrive, all under one roof for the first time in a few years, Judith surveys them. “We’re so lucky,” she says, yet the siblings have all inherited their mother’s slightly anxious...