Secrets and lies exposed in bourgeois nightmare Harry Greenwood, left, Geraldine Hakewill, Sarah Peirse and Robert Menzies in the STC production of Fury. Picture: Lisa Tomasetti Source: Supplied THEATRE Fury, by Joanna Murray-Smith. Sydney Theatre Company, April 19 JOANNA Murray-Smith recently spoke on radio of the seductive power of argument, of recalling the sound of her parents and their friends talking passionately long into the night. Those long-evaporated murmurs are the wellspring of Fury, Murray-Smith's absorbing new play. Alice (Sarah Peirse) is a neuroscientist at the top of her game and about to receive a huge honour when her 16-year-old son Joe (Harry Greenwood) does something incendiary. Alice is as aghast as you'd expect of any intelligent, socially committed, left-leaning woman and mother, but Joe's act of rebellion -- assertion, independence, whatever -- opens up family fault lines at the very moment Alice's life is up for public scrutiny. "You're not who you said you were," her novelist husband Patrick is driven to say as Alice must finally acknowledge an intellectually messy and morally grubby truth. Under Andrew Upton's direction, the play's concerns unfold crisply in a series of set-piece conversations and confrontations. Murray-Smith's familiar style of whip-smart dialogue and ever-so-slightly heightened realism is matched perfectly by designer David Fleischer's setting of monolithic grey walls and a desirable tiled floor. It's a cool, cerebral space in which outbursts of emotion look surprising, as if rare here. Alice says in the play's opening scene that there's "always something to hide," but it doesn't appear to occur to her that this is more than a clever quip to a journalist. Ah, yes, the journalist. Murray-Smith gives a writer from a student rag a key role, but despite Geraldine Hakewill's creditable efforts to animate the part, it never rings true. Rebecca is a device, not a character, and it's scarcely credible she would get this degree of access to Alice and Patrick, played with rumpled defensiveness by Robert Menzies. That jarring note aside, Fury proceeds at a compelling pace for its 100 minutes or so. The many themes emerge with great clarity, among them the porous line between idealism and self-centredness, the clash of generations, the centrality of family, the secret and changing self, the animating power of rage. Murray-Smith hones her lines to a high sheen that can introduce a whiff of the lecture room but the pay-off is in her acutely aware observations. There's the occasional zinger, too: vegans beware. Peirse has a cracker of a role in Alice and gets the fragility not far beneath the witty, ultra-capable surface. Greenwood, making his Sydney Theatre Company debut, is extraordinarily good as the truculent, initially monosyllabic youth, making him brightly alive and engaging. And Fury is possibly at its most challenging and fascinating through the articulate pragmatism of Annie and Bob (Claire Jones and Yure Covich, both wonderful), the working-class parents of Joe's sidekick in crime, the unseen Trevor. Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf 1. Tickets: $90-$95. Ends June 8.