John Williamson’s “masterful final act” (according to The Australian, but I didn’t know he’d stopped writing plays) Influence is currently playing at the Dunstan Theatre in Adelaide. Since we haven’t been to see anything since A Number, and Jaq won a raffle with a season ticket, we went to see it on Saturday night. John Waters is “Ziggi Blasco”, a conservative, hate-mongering talk radio host, along the lines of John Laws, Alan Jones and their ilk. His wife was a former ballet dancer - she was never really top of the heap but once performed the lead role of a production in London, but only because the two top dancers were both injured. Anyway, she is the most vile, vapid creature who is unable to believe that a) she isn’t going to make it big again, and b) other people have challenges in their lives that are much harder to live with. Things begin to get worse when Ziggi’s daughter from his first marriage, and his father, move into the Blasco mansion on the same day. Both have their own issues, which deepen as the story unfolds. This time of upheaval is made worse by the fact that Mrs. Blasco doesn’t seem to be able to find a good housekeeper (or, at least, one that will stick around), and hires a member of the “working poor”, a Turkish single mother of three, who has to travel hours every morning and night to and from work. The other characters are Ziggi’s sister Connie, a very left leaning psychologist, and Tony, the Blasco’s driver/butler/gardener. Most of the characters were believable, if somewhat stereotyped. I found John Waters a little hard to understand when he was “on air”, as his speech was somewhat unlike that of the “golden tonsils”, or most talk radio hosts whom he was based upon. But he was a perfect copy of Laws’ style of radio, with even the obligatory “Now just wait a minute, I was having lunch with some of my friends who are pharmaceutical company executives the other day, and they are really nice fellas.” Zöe Carides was magnificent as Zehra, the housekeeper who doesn’t seem to be able to say the right thing, ever. “Better not to be that good looking. More time to spend on doing schoolwork.” Not quite what you want to say to a (clearly) jumpy Year 12 student, who has just complained about always being called a dog by the boys on the train. Zehra, and Ziggi’s father (I’m not sure that we ever heard his name) nearly brought me to tears as they showed the depth of character that made them real. My only hassle with Influence was the cheap laughs. Williamson took the easy track in a lot of situations - he didn’t have to work hard at all to get laughter from the audience. Which really annoyed me, because at other times, he clearly had put the effort into making stuff genuinely funny. Or, at least I, and a couple of others in the audience, thought so. By all means, if you get the chance, go and see Influence. Laugh if you must, but don’t let that stop you taking away the message I did: Australia is in trouble now. I’m not sure how we stop the slide to right-wing nationalism, (aptly hilighted by Blasco senior’s dilemma) but I hope we can.
