Free Emerald City by David Williamson

don’t you?
    COLIN : [ to the audience ] I couldn’t do it. In the seventies you could wreck marriages and traumatise kids and call it personal growth. In the eighties we realised that personal growth was a polite term for self-indulgence.
    HELEN : [ to the audience ] What a bummer. Still, you can’t win ’em all.
    COLIN : [ to the audience , berating himself ] Gutless, pathetic, pathologically timid! But it probably was just as well.
    They stare at each other in the moonlight, nod, and finally part. They exit. Some time later COLIN walks into his living room, KATE sits there with an inscrutable look on her face. COLIN looks agitated and annoyed. As always, when worked up about something, COLIN patrols up and down gesticulating as he speaks.
    KATE : What’s wrong?
    COLIN : Kate, what am I doing with my life? I’ve just been to a Film Commission cocktail party and met a Polish director who works under daily threat and yet he makes masterpieces! I have every freedom in the world and I’m writing shit!
    KATE : Not quite every freedom. The money men won’t look at anything that’s not sex, sadism or sensation.
    COLIN : [ at a peak of gesticulation ] That’s the excuse I use to justify what I’m doing, but honestly, isn’t it just that? An excuse? A justification? Couldn’t I fight harder? Couldn’t I batter at the walls? Couldn’t I keep going back, bloody and wounded, until I found someone in this merciless money maze who asked what sort of film he was putting his money into, rather than the rate of return he thinks he’ll get? There must be rich men with the souls of artists out there and it’s my responsibility to find them. Why don’t I? Why don’t I try?
    KATE : Apparently because you want money and power.
    COLIN : I don’t want money and power!
    KATE : You did yesterday.
    COLIN : I don’t any longer.
    KATE : Good. Want to know my news?
    COLIN : What?
    KATE : Black Rage ’s been selected as a finalist in the Booker Prize.
    COLIN : The Booker?
    KATE : [ nodding ] Everyone in the office went berserk, and guess who was the first to congratulate me? Ian. The man who opposed it all the way.
    COLIN : [ dully ] That’s great.
    KATE : I’m being flown over there.
    COLIN : To London?
    KATE : [ nodding ] We’ve got to be represented in case we win.
    COLIN : What about the author?
    KATE : She’ll be there too. They’re flying us first class.
    COLIN : First class? I’ve never flown anywhere first class in my life.
    KATE : The Booker is big time, my dear. Big time. Just in being nominated will double our sales and there’ll be huge sales in the States if we win. Huge sales. When Tom Keneally won the Booker, Stephen Spielberg bought the film rights.
    COLIN : [ moral outrage sparked ] Wait a minute? Hang on there! Wasn’t Black Rage going to be the book that was only going to sell a thousand or two but seep slowly into our consciousness? Stephen Spielberg? What kind of film will Stephen Spielberg make? Aliens descending in spaceships to take our downtrodden Aboriginals off to a loving, more equitable planet? Where are your ideals, woman? What’s happened to your ideals?
    KATE : [ defensively ] Nothing!
    COLIN picks up a brochure KATE has brought in with her. He reads it.
    COLIN : Thai Airways? You’re going to be met at the doorway by an ‘elegant and courteous stewardess attired in traditional Thai dress, and offered your choice of French champagne or orange juice and delicious satay beef cubes and crab claws to nibble on’. How wonderful for you.
    KATE : For once in my life I’m going to have a little bit of luxury and enjoy it.
    COLIN : You’re living in a city in which thousands are homeless!
    KATE : I can’t do anything about it in the short term, can I?
    COLIN : Not when you’re thirty thousand feet up nibbling crabs’ claws, no.
    KATE : I voted for the government that should be