With Lachlan and Rupert’s relationship given the New York magazine treatment, dynastic father-son relationships are the topic du jour.

Noting
this, one tipster wrote to Crikey to suggest we might be diverted by a
“very amusing and cruel send up of a couple of media moguls screwing up
the lives of their children in a play at the Darlinghurst Theatre in
Sydney.”

The play, now showing, is called Young Tycoons. According to the blurb, its protagonists Trevor and Kim “are two young men on the verge of
being handed more wealth, power and prestige than is commonly
imaginable, but can they handle it? Or is there truth in the old adage:
The first generation acquires it, the second generation builds it…
and the third generation f**ks it up!”

So did writer Christopher Johnson, who also plays a reporter from a newspaper company called “Fitzgerald” in the play, intend Young Tycoons to be a send-up of the Murdoch-Packer family travails? And is he worried about litigation?

“Ridiculous,”
says Johnson. While media tycoons and their sons are the play’s
starting point, it draws inspiration from “many many many” different
sources, including the Adlers, Vizards, Rivkins, Riches, Murdochs and
Packers of this world.

That said, Christopher, who wrote the play a year ago, admits “there are very spooky resonances” with Young Tycoons and “what’s happened to Lachlan in the past year.”

That
whole world is “fascinating,” he says – especially the “father-son
dynamics” within it. Put simply, it’s “the stuff of good drama” – as New York magazine’s dirty linen-airing article has amply demonstrated.

At one point in Young Tycoons,
the son, when pressed to carry out his father’s wishes, asks: “What if
I don’t want to?” To which his father retorts: “You don’t want to run
the world?”