The seriously hilarious Americanisation of the Australian theatre audience

How funny is The Great Fire, a new play by Kit Brookman?

Well, not funny at all if the audience at Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney's Surry Hills is your guide.

Comprised of Boomers and Millennials, the audience was the narrative. Maybe that was the problem – too close to home.

Brookman has written a very funny, imaginative work and the cast members provide superlative delivery of the product, especially the gorgeous and delectable Genevieve Picot.

But if you were waiting for the funny bits to be applauded and laughed at you will be waiting a very long time.

The whole play was funny - full of irony and folly.

So either we have become so politically correct that we feel we need to frown upon the most innocuous aside, or we have become Americanised.

Brookman has our number.

The Great Fire is right up there with Martin McDonagh's Pillowman - contemporary narratives that take the piss and show us exactly what it is we look like from the outside.

We Boomers don't like anyone taking the piss out of us. We worked very hard to get where we are and we take seriously the concepts of global warming, unemployment and migration.

We can't help it if Millennials can't find work and can't pay the rent. In the sixties and seventies we wrote songs about how hard it was for us breaking away from our Frugal parents and grandparents.

We know all about the hardship of living on a state superannuation pension, the exhaustion of constant travel between our city apartment and the beach house, the anxious decisions we have to make about leaving the fridge on or getting someone reliable to mow.

Brookman let the Frugals off with a nod of respect, but he hooks right in to Boomers and Millennials.

Here were the Boomers, Judith and Patrick (Ms Picot and Geoff Morrell) returning for Christmas to their 25 year old farm somewhere in rural South Australia.

Their daughter Lily (Shelly Lauman) had been in residence for some time with Michael (Eden Falk), her husband of four years.

Michael wants Lily to ask mom and dad, when they arrive, for a rent reduction - ten bucks - seriously hilarious.

Lily's reticence is unexplained but Michael harps and harps.

On arrival, Judith begins straightening and moving. Small things - a chair here, a tea towel there - reprising her own mother.

Patrick picks up where he left off in the garden. Straightening and moving - a chook shed here, a fence there - reprising, you guessed it, his own father.

The irony, the irony.

Judith and Patrick have three children. Lily's brothers Alex (Yalin Ozucelik) whose pseudo-patricide monologue towards the denouement raises nary a whimper from the audience, and Tom (Marcus McKenzie), seriously hilarious as he explains to his demented grand dad Donald (Peter Carrol) that he got herpes from his ex boyfriend.

Funny stuff. All three Millennial offspring are unemployed. Seriously. Alex's wife Hannah (Sarah Armanious) is pregnant. Yep. Seriously. All three see themselves following their mother into 'the arts'. Maybe. Sometime in the future if they can find time to stop thinking about how to pay the rent.

Judith, bless her fine linen blouses, is anxious about the decision she and Patrick have made to return permanently to the farm.

Not to abandon completely the bolt hole in Sydney mind, but to keep it because they have fond memories of that life too.

But the warmth and value of the imagined life they led at the farm is all too great. With offspring fragmenting in front of their eyes, they lay unsparingly into the garden and the semillon, declaring their intent to return full time to the life the Boomer demands - another decade or so before the welfare system supports them into finality.

Seriously. And so. Here we are, more than two hours later, at the end. There was a bit of a bushfire in the hills around the farm. Nothing unusual in that for December and January in Australia.

If you are expecting the house to burn down, or at least the chook shed, then you will be bitterly disappointed.

There is chook shed, not blood shed. But this is not Vikings. It is not Game of Thrones. Nor is it Sons of Anarchy.

Maybe that was the difficulty for the Millennials in the audience. There were no dramatic televisual markers; no gratuitous sex, no beheadings, just mom and dad doing the gardening and drinking the semillon.

Pretty boring really. Nothing they hadn't seen at home. Not funny at all. Seriously.