Hannie Rayson, the Australian playwright, has written a virtuosic but ultimately unsatisfying play, though brilliantly acted by all and excellently directed by Michael Blakemore.
    In terms of narrative flow, pacing and, occasionally, phrase-making, the text is well crafted. It consists of a breathless succession of short flashbacks into George's past life, his relationships to the four women central to it – three wives and an under-achieving, truculent, emotionally lost daughter from his first – and their relations with each other.
    George himself, a Geordie inspired by the Paris student rebellions of 1968 who ends up at a university in Melbourne, is a committed Marxist academic: an unrelenting class warrior, opposed to all private enterprise, dedicated to political action. He loves humanity much more than he loves humans. He is as rich in integrity and idealism in his professional life as he lacks them in his private life. His successive wives are all too mesmerized by his intellectual charisma to see this, at least at first, except for his neglected, troubled daughter, Ana, superbly played by Susannah Wise.
    The problem with this play, and it becomes increasingly burdensome as it progresses, is that the characters are little more than caricatures – at times, almost cardboard cut-outs. George's voluminous writings supposedly intrigue not merely young female students, but also the likes of Milton Friedman, Arthur Miller and Susan Sontag. But you have to take this on trust because George never says anything at all interesting or unusual. He just spouts Marxist platitudes and courts his women in a thoroughly conventional way. Nothing suggests that he has insightful purchase on the problems of society, let alone any wisdom distilled from all his learning. You are left to wonder about the proverbial blindness of, in this case female, passion.
    Stephen Dillane manages superbly with the little material he is given, mustering all his formidable resources of irony, obsessiveness and dazzling diction in its service. But the power of his performance only underlines the two-dimensionality of the part as it lies in the text.
    Lindsay, the second wife, develops from student feminist to Dean of the Faculty (and George's boss). Joanne Pearce has just the versatility for the role, having to mutate, sometimes within seconds, from star-struck socialist student to senior academic manager who has made her pact with the capitalist devil, and back again.
    Poppy, the third, is the young postmodernist, mouthing the clichÚs of that particular fashion, and introspective in a nineties way, but movingly played by Anna Wilson-Jones, especially in her bereavement after George gets killed in a plane crash.
    The central theme of the second part of the play – three wives quarrelling over who their husband was and how to commemorate his life – is wonderfully rich in potential. In many ways, it is more original than the play's overt subject: the dangers posed by today's marketing culture, with its emphasis on the practical and the measurable and the vocational, to academic integrity, to the ideals of a broad, liberal humanistic education, and, indeed, to the holding of any ideals at all. Sadly, however, these themes are more stated than explored by Rayson's text.
Simon May