 The play takes many swipes at contemporary occurrences in the entertainment industry, such as Steven Spielberg's purchase of Australian writer Thomas Keneally's novel "Schindler's Ark", which one character jokes will be made into a film in which the Jews are rescued by space aliens.At one point, Mike sums up the "great Australian novel", Henry Handel Richardson's "The Fortunes of Richard Mahony", as "Doctor's marriage goes bad, he goes to the goldfields, gets gangrene and dies", to which Kate says "I don't think your synopsis quite does the book justice".To that, he simply dismisses it as a "downer".