Australian playwright JOANNA MURRAY-SMITH gives herself ninety minutes to get under the skin of modern, middle-class marriage in NINETY, as reviewed by SEANNA VAN HELTEN.

So here’s the pitch, ladies: you’ve got exactly one hour and a half hours to convince your ex-husband – your rich, famous, and about-to-be-remarried ex-husband – that your estranged relationship is worth saving.

Sound appealing? This is the premise that unfolds in Joanna Murray-Smith’s perceptive short drama, Ninety. The play premiered in August 2008 with Melbourne Theatre Company and, bar the replacement of original cast member Melinda Butel with Rachel Gordon, Queensland Theatre Company presents this month the same production, directed by Simon Phillips.

William (Kym Gyngell) is a middle-aged actor who revels in his newfound fame on the Hollywood small screen. His career is in bloom, and within days he is about to re-marry a young actress in a lavish Paris ceremony. But his ex-wife, art conservator Isabel (Gordon) has asked William to her studio for just ninety minutes of his precious time – ninety minutes in which she plans to persuade her former lover that he loves her as she loves him.

It seems far too rational a plea to make for love, constituted as it is by unruly things like passion. And William does not buy it, insisting to Isabel, “I just don’t love you anymore.”

But gradually, through flashbacks, the tender history of this couple’s relationship is uncovered: the younger Isabel’s seduction of her drama professor William; William’s public marriage proposal; an impoverished honeymoon in Rome; the birth of their daughter, Bea.

The protagonists’ professions are instructive to their characters: vain and archly pompous William is the master illusionist (and disappearing artist), whereas Isabel works painstakingly in her studio to restore a cracked painting, reminiscent of Jan Van Eyck’s famous ‘Mr and Mrs Arnolifini’ painting. Like the painting, Ninety itself is a portrait of a marriage. Murray-Smith’s text crackles when she deploys the swift humour of one-liners and the cheeky, familiar antagonism between the sexes.

Isabel and William are flawed but not exceptional individuals; they talk, they over-analyse, they admit to disliking the irritating things about one another. However, Murray-Smith reveals that at the core of their self-involved, comfortable bourgeois lives is something more profound: a shared grief that may explain their failed marriage.

Designer Andrew Bellchambers’ circular set – confining the action to Isabel’s studio – cleverly alludes to a clock’s movement as it rotates almost imperceptibly throughout the show. The stage’s rotation also invites audiences to inspect this couple’s relationship at all angles, revealing something new with each turn, and as each minute ticks over.

The acting is to be credited to this effect, too, with Gordon and Gyngell making even the worst of their characters’ flaws endearing both with humour and with pathos. Gyngell’s reduction of William’s arrogance to sheer panic as he recounts a disastrous day with his newborn is a highlight; Gordon’s Isabel is an intelligent, thoughtful foil, while equally blessed with comic shrewdness.

I was affected by the intimate scenario depicted, and so was curious to read reviews of the work’s season in Melbourne. Some critics dismayed at the unlikeliness of Isabel’s attempt at persuasion, or at the couple’s verbose and frank discussions about desire and sex.

These were actually the things that interested me: the mix of intimacy and intellectualism as the chipped layers to the characters’ shared history gradually flaked away; the emotional weight of memory; the idiosyncrasies of a particular relationship and, by extension, Murray-Smith’s flair for exploring the fears and faithlessness of modern marriage.

NINETY plays at the Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, until Sep 5. For tickets phone 136 246 or visit www.qtix.com.au.

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