The John Wayne principle was "shoot first, ask questions later". But in Tony McNamara's wicked Australian comedy this means a multinational tycoon shooting himself in the head and leaving all the questions in a suicide note to his prodigal son Robbie.
Dad's challenge is for Robbie to run the business for a year; if he does so successfully, he inherits his share of the $120 million fortune. If not, he gets nothing. Robbie, however, has dropped out in a north Queensland hideaway - as far away from his ogre father as possible. Despite this voluntary exile, financial inducements from his sister and emotional pressure from his wife, means he decides to take up Dad's gauntlet. To the delight of his vulturous colleagues, $20 million is instantly wiped off the company share price.
Like movies such as Brewster's Millions, McNamara's play is idea, rather than theme, driven. He gleefully satirises the sexualised language of commerce and revels in the infantile drives locked there-in. But it's the can-Robbie or can't-he energy that keeps the play in business.
Meanwhile, despite some gratuitous plot twists, the story makes a solid profit as a moral fable of psychological transformation. The warmth and simplicity of the story is well understood by Patrick Sandford's busy and impressively fluent direction on Ti Green's slick chrome set presided over by Dad's hospitalised body.
David Henry's capitalist pig, Alvin Join, is gloriously repellent in the Barry Humphries/Les Patterson mould and Lucinda Cowden is a cheekily saucy company secretary. She also doubles up as the trophy wife to Nicholas Rowe's turboyuppie Stafford - hilariously haunted by the prospect of going to jail and becoming someone's "bitch".
But it's Alan Westaway as the bleached-haired dropout who keeps the show solvent. He supplants the legacy of his father, less by buying into the epistemology of John Wayne and more by ditching his secondhand, boyish idealism to peddle a tougher, more pragmatic set of principles of his own.
The John Wayne Principle
