by
Helen Garner
The play veered between being really funny and wallowing in embarrassing sentimentality. ‘There’s nothing wrong with sentiment, as long as it’s not masquerading as real feeling,’ said Professor Maxwell at Melbourne University twenty years ago. But in this case it is masquerading. Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.
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