David Williamson is the most performed playwright in Australia, though best known here for providing Madonna with an indifferent West End vehicle, the art market satire Up for Grabs.
A Conversation is one of three plays Williamson has written exploring the process of transformative justice - a system in which the perpetrators and victims of crime are brought into dialogue. Transformative justice has its supporters - and Williamson is clearly one of them - but it is rarely used in situations as extreme as the one Williamson describes, in which the families of a sadistic sex murderer and his victim come face to face.
The situation has all the ingredients of high drama - action unfolding in real time with passionately irreconcilable points of view - and you sense Williamson wishes us to view the action as Greek tragedy transplanted to a Sydney suburb.
This concept has two fundamental flaws. True tragedy builds up towards a violent conclusion - here we are merely picking through the aftermath. The second problem, which Jacob Murray's simmering but ultimately anodyne production struggles to overcome, is the visual poverty of the conference situation. It is as if the Furies, instead of descending to exact retribution, were to sit down and discuss things reasonably over coffee and biscuits.
This is exactly why transformative justice may have a positive role to play in the rehabilitation of offenders, but it mitigates against its value as drama. Ultimately, Williamson's work is no more than a PR exercise for a controversial process - it feels more like a transcript than a play.
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