Moments of transformation are difficult to capture in words, but the effects of such experiences can be life-changing. Tony McNamara had one such epiphany in a Rome hotel.
McNamara describes himself as both a playwright and a director, a luxury in an industry full of wannabes who’d be grateful for a crack at just one of those job descriptions. His first major film, The Rage in Placid Lake, an amusing yet vicious take on the upside-down life of Placid, the son of self-indulged baby-boomers, is due for release on 22 August. It is the film version of his successful play The Café Latte Kid, the first of four plays that have performed to full houses, good reviews and public acclaim. McNamara has a fifth on the boil but reserves the writer’s right not to discuss it, since it’s still in formation.
The Café Latte Kid debuted with the Sydney Theatre Company’s New Stages, was nominated for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and won the Phillips Parsons Award for Young Playwrights, all in 1995.
McNamara believes it was a success because it took a new and angry position on baby-boomers. By calling his lead character Placid (he is anything but), McNamara satirises all the parents who’ve ever called a child River, Tiger or Summer. Placid’s baby-boomer parents consider that no matter how self-obsessed they are, if they are happy their child will be too. The play charts them blithely following this philosophy, rationalising all the evidence to the contrary, as Placid hurtles towards self-destruction.
McNamara is a gentle man of 37 with an endearingly easy manner. He hasn’t shed his Melbourne identity, despite exposure to the faster pace of Sydney and its more impatient social interactions. He is gracious when I fumble the film’s name.
‘It’s not Lake Placid, it’s Placid Lake. Lake is his surname,’ he reminds me. And the rage is in not on.
He’s had a blessed career (not his word) and recognises his good fortune: ‘I’m in the position where people go to see my plays in tens of thousands. They want to watch my plays, I write for TV, I write for film—I make a living out of something I love.’
All said without a touch of arrogance or neurotic posturing. Nor any suggestion of fear that it could all crash down, a thought he claims has never occurred to him.
Not for a minute during the making of Placid, as McNamara