The Grenade

What would you do if you found a grenade inside your house? Probably not what Busby McTavish (Garry McDonald) does, which is to immediately lose his shit in the most ludicrous and expensive way imaginable, installing hi-tech surveillance equipment and titanium shutters on the windows of his home. An older gent, he has a much younger wife, ex-nun turned romantic fiction writer Sally (Belinda Bromilow). They have just had a baby, four month old Michael, who is displaying signs of being possessed by the devil. His Mensa-smart daughter Lola (Eloise Mignon) is from a previous marriage and is devastatingly socially retarded, though not quite so much as her school-yard crush, Wheat. Enter the unsubtly named Randy (Bert Labonte) as a the erotic fiction writer who buddies up with Sally to write a new book, and Mitchell Butel as the flamboyant lackey of the political operative Busby and the stage is set for a belaboured, sit-com like play that reveals little about anything but that older men maybe shouldn't get younger wives because they will spend the rest of the marriage freaking out and feeling insecure.

Tony McNamara has written many well-received plays, but this is not a work for the ages. Described as a parody of 'our' obsession with national security (what is this, 2003?), the finding of the grenade itself is but vaguely dealt with (it spends most of the play, inexplicably, in a drawer); it is actually an excuse to out some rather outdated notions of relationships. The paranoid Busby is worried because his teenage daughter wants to have sex, but his wife doesn't, and despite her assurances that she has no interest in her work partner, he is afraid that this younger alpha male is going to steal her – denying his wife any say in the matter. He resorts to more and more pitiable means of monitoring the behaviour of both wife and daughter. His deeply insecure and mistrustful behaviour is gussied up as comedy, as indicated by some very pedestrian punchlines.

The actors are good but the characters are unremarkable. Garry McDonald is an acknowledged comic genius, but Busby is somewhere between unlikable and downright repulsive. Defter lines could have made Lola less of a caricature; her friend Wheat (Gig Clarke) is funny – for a while – until his robotic movements begin to grate; Butel's Whitman, Busby's sidekick, is an almost pointless character except to give Busby someone to talk to and prop up his wildly inappropriate responses to life. Labonte's Randy has a slightly crazed appearance that is quite amusing, but is anyone truly that obsessed with sex?

The revolving set designed by Richard Roberts is classy and well used; the lighting is also particularly apt. It is simply surprising however that a blindingly non-theatrical event should make it to a stage at all. In an STC programme that has seen some new shows that truly celebrate the variety available to the theatrical medium – Stockholm and Optimism, for instance – and some electrifyingly epic plays (August: Osage County, Our Town, True West),  The Grenade stands out as bourgeois and insubstantial. Its wimpy attempts at absurdism (the unseen demonic baby Michael, for instance) belong in a different play. Give us something to sink our teeth into next time: this is suitable only for those who have left their dentures at home. Vivienne Egan