The Give and Take

The life of Gary McDonald as Don in Tony McNamara’s The Give and Take is unraveling around him. His wife of many years has suddenly left him to get laid properly in Tuscany. When he tells his three grown up children, that their mum has left him, they tell him that they know, they drove her to the airport! At work as a corporate executive of a garden supplies business, he is being pressured to take the plumb CEO position but is ambivalent about it and feels that it is his very obsession with his career that hasn’t given him enough time with his wife and family. He decides to spend some time with his kids but they’re not there for him. Don doesn’t know which way to turn.
The Give and Take is McNamara’s sixth play to be produced by the Sydney Theatre Company, in a canon of work that includes The John Wayne Principle and The Rage in Placid Lake that was also made into a film which the talented playwright directed and starred Rose Byrne and Ben Lee. In his program notes McNamara said that he wrote his latest play especially for Gary McDonald. I thought it was his best work yet still with reservations.
The strongest parts to The Give and Take…Peter Evans’s fast pace direction, and the sharp humour including some incisive one-liners in the writing…the play’s very contemporary feel in its portrayal of a middle aged man who has let his career run his life to the detriment of his family, as well as in its portrayal of the young characters…Robert Kemp’s great two tiered set design with its numerous ‘cubby holes’ where different sequences within the play could be played out…and uniformly good performances with my picks being Gary McDonald, there was even a hyper aka Norman Gunston moment, Alyssa McLelland as Don’s troubled lesbian daughter, an outstanding Ed Wightman as Don’s punky, leftish son, Neil, and Marney McQueen as Neil’s even more radical and outrageous girlfriend, Patti.
The flattest part to The Give and Take was in the playwright continuing with the unnecessary coarse quality of some of his writing. It may pay him to remember that he is playing to sophisticated audiences who just don’t need or even want it!