33 Australian Play by a Writer of European Descent: David Williamson – Don’s Party (1971)

Ms. Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty

Content

This module aims to introduce the Australian plays by the writers of European descent.
It will provide a detailed discussion of David Williamson as the Australian playwright of European descent.
The module will focus on David Williamson’s famous play, Don’s Party (1971) in specific.
It will further analyse the themes and dramatic style of Williamson’s plays.

Introduction

When in 1788 the First Fleet came to Australia with a bunch of convicts, not only the Europeans set foot in the unknown land, but the European cultural tradition also found a new land to proliferate. European theatrical tradition also came with the First Fleet and the following year saw the performance of one European play in the Australian soil. The convicts performed George Farquhar’s play The Recruiting Officer in 1789 and it became the first formal production of a play. It was an extraordinary situation when the Australian theatre was established. Australian theatre evolved to attain its distinctive character after the Australian Federation in 1901 and the Australianness was eminent in the plays like Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection (1912) and Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) which portrayed resolutely Australian character and the struggle of the Australian people for survival in the Australian landscape. With the plays of David Williamson, Barry Oakley, Jack Hibberd, Alan Seymour and Nick Enright after the 1970s, Australian theatre witnessed a new wave. Among the Australian playwrights of this era, David Williamson attained an unprecedented eminence both in the national and international stage.

David Williamson- The Playwright

Sandra Bates in the ‘Foreword’ to David Williamson’s book Collected Plays writes, So what is it that makes David’s success unique in Australia’s theatre history? I believe it has a lot to do with his ability to see and understand Australia’s current circumstances, our society’s circumstances right here right now, indeed to be ahead of what is current so that by the time his plays are produced approximately two years after he has first had the ideas for a play, at production time, the play is absolutely timely. This ability to foresee what is likely to happen is why he is such a theatre genius.

David Keith Williamson began his dramatic career as a writer of short comic sketches and satirical portraits for Melbourne University Union’s Theatre, Monash University student reviews and the Emerald Hill Theatre Company in the 1960s. His formal study of the social psychology enriched his creative vision and his penetrating observation of the social and cultural mindscape of the Australian middle class. In 1967, his work as a professional playwright began in The La Mama Theatre Company and The Pram Factory. His first full- length play, The Coming of Stork, which is to become a successful film, Stork, was performed in The La Mama Theatre Company in 1970. But Don’s Party (1971) and The Removalist (1971) gave him fame as a playwright in the 1970s. This was followed by Williamson’s prolific outpourings as a playwright in the plays like Jugglers Three (1972), What If You Died Tomorrow? (1973), The Department (1975), A Handful of Friends (1976), and The Club (1977). Williamson’s dramatic oeuvre is tinged with his naturalistic representations of the Australian life with a mixture of local vernacular. Social problems and a keen insight into the social interaction characterize his plays.

The Removalist is regarded as one of the representative work in the world of Australian drama. It presents a classic rendering of the Australian authoritarianism through a portrayal of a young police man’s initiation to his duty and how his first day at work becomes an experience of violence and law enforcement. On the other hand, Don’s Party charts the hope and disillusionment of Don and Kath who hoped for a change of government during the 1969 election and saw the emergence of the Conservatives in the power at the end. Both of these two plays blend biting humour with critical and often satirical understanding of politics, violence and sexism. Williamson is dealing with marital tensions in his play Jugglers Three, which is adapted later in the play, Third World Blues. Autobiographical moments can be found in the play What If You Died Tomorrow? which is centered on a novelist’s treatment of success.

The Department and The Club delve deep into the social dynamics of bureaucracies. Williamson also wrote comedy of manners like The Perfectionist (1983) and Emerald City (1987). In Williamson’s Dead White Males (1995), William Shakespeare appeared as a chief character in conversation with his modern day scholars while Williamson’s another play Heretic (1996) deals with the conflict between the anthropologist Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman over the nature of humanity. Other plays of David Williamson are Travelling North (1980), Top Silk (1989), Money & Friends (1992), Brilliant Lies (1993), Up for Grabs (2001), and Influence (2005).

Don’s Party

This 1971 play was based on the 1969 Federal Election in Australia. The political event is used to trigger off a detailed commentary on the hopes and disappointment, party and pain of group of men and women which finally ends in the emergence not only of the Liberal Party as the victorious one but also in the rise of the conservative social and ethical values. When David Williamson was asked why he wrote the play, he replied.

One was, what had happened to Don and his friends? The 20-somethings of Don’s Party were starting to ask themselves how their lives were going to pan out. Would their hopes and dreams be realised? Forty years later they know exactly how things have panned out – who has succeeded and who has failed and what criteria do you use to evaluate such questions in any case? Secondly, what has happened to Australia politically and socially in the intervening years? How has the landscape changed?

The Plot

Don Henderson throws a party on the night of the Federal Election in 1969. He is a Australian Labor Party supporter. The play is set in suburban Melbourne where Don is living with his wife, Kath and his baby son. The party is thrown in anticipating the win of the Australian Labor Party without the consent of Don’s wife, Kath who eventually has to be engaged in hosting the party. The guests in the party include Don’s university mentor, Mal and his unhappy wife, Jenny; Cooley who is sex-obsessed and a womanizer along with his present teenager girlfriend, Susan; Don’s dentist friend, Evan and his wife, Kerry who is beautiful and an artist and Simon and Jody who are Liberal supporters. The participants in the party are allegedly there to watch the vote counting in the television but their real purpose is to indulge in drinking, in expressing resentments against each- other, exposing their mid-life crisis, engaging into obscene sexual affairs while their women partners are gathering in the lounge room to talk about their children and their unsatisfactory sex lives.

With the gradual movement of the play, it becomes clear to Don and his guests that the Labor Party is not winning and it causes dismay to the guests as most of them are supporting the Labor Party. They have engaged in sly verbal attacks on each other after few pegs of drinks and drown themselves in sexual obscenity, disappointments in life and disrespect for their women. The women on the other hand express their utter dismay in their male companion’s treatment and share their tales of suffering. The disillusionments take the centre stage in the lives of Don and his companions in the party when the election night ends with the news of win of the Liberal Party bringing in the conservatism in the political and social landscape of Australia.

Critical Analysis

Don’s Party has the primary effect of an exhilarating frankness ending up in drunken melancholy where the financial failures, sexual lewdness, secret behaviours of Don’s guests in his party are exposed. David Williamson brings the culture of English drawing room comedy in Don’s Party with the blending of the vernacular Australian. While talking about Don’s Party, he comments

Australia’s chauvinism, materialism, conservatism and its suburban conformity were put under the microscope, but even as I was savaging such tendencies in plays such as Don’s Party it was apparent to me and to audiences that I found my country endearing as well as horrific – our black sardonic humour, our energy, our directness and our hatred of pretentiousness.

The Title

The title is interesting and double-edged. The title ‘Don’s Party’ suggests the party which Don Henderson supported and which he had thought would win in the election. It is the Australian Labor Party. On the other hand the title of the play points towards the focal event of the play- the party which is hosted by Don and his wife, Kath on the 1969 election night. Thus the word ‘party’ has a double meaning here, indicating both to a political party and a get-together.

The Australianness

As David Williamson told in one of his lecture

…I’ve realised I’ve been looking into this issue all of my life. As one of a group of young playwrights who came to prominence in the early ’70s our group mission, in so far as we articulated it, was to investigate the “Australian Identity”.

One thing which is prominent in the play, Don’s Party is its unmistakable Australianness. The frustrated young professional who are represented in the play can be sympathized by the young readers and the audience as the essential trappings of the Australian middle class party are presented in the party such as the beer, the home-made pizza, the Twisties, the bawdy jokes cracked on by the men, the women gossiping about their marital and sexual life and the whole affair ending in drunken argument. He brings together eleven representatives of a particular section of Australia in the election night party and then making them indulge in boisterous drunkenness, sexual licentiousness and hopeless melancholy, Williamson represents a certain segment of Australian mindscape with which the Australian audience can identify.

Documentation of Social Life

Don’s Party can be considered as the social document per excellence. Its exact social presentation is the secret behind its popularity. David Williamson’s success as a playwright lies in his holding the mirror to the Australians as they are. As Katharine Brisbane wrote in her review of Don’s Party that the play is a “study of inertia” and she adds But it is the familiarity of the characters that startles and captures the audience, not any dramatic contrivance by the writer. The shock of familiarity is still a novelty on our stages.

The confessional mood in the representation of the dramatic narrative captures the sympathetic identification between the characters and the audience. This sense of ‘familiarity’ simultaneously celebrates the Australian spirit of resilience and vulgarity, struggle and failings while coping up with the larger social life. Thus the emotional involvement is unavoidable while the play also offers a comical critique of the foibles of the characters.

Exposure of Pretentions

Pretentions of ambitions and the exposure of these pretentions are one of the central themes the play is revolving around. How the pretentions of youth are flouted and how the disappointments of the middle life take the place of the ambitious youth remain at the heart of the play. Don’s ambition of becoming a novelist is frustrated. The political ambition of his university mentor, Mal is reduced to being an arm-chair critic.

Naturalism

The play’s frankness owes to the naturalistic representation of the characters and the actions. Williamson is fond of writing a kind of journalistic drama where he concentrates on depicting the details of behaviours and actions and to underline the hidden meanings of the words of the mouth. His naturalism often tends to paint the vulgarity of the social scene. But Don’s Party becomes so lovable as a play for its naturalistic representation of what happens in a party which begins with expected sociable gestures, but with the flow of the wine and beers, ends up in drunken melancholy and exposure of follies and failures. H. G. Kippax in his review of Don’s Party in the Sydney Morning Herald comments in reference to David Williamson’s use of naturalism, The dirt is defensible, in the second place, because it is Mr Williamson’s running metaphor for violence- not the overt physical violence of The Removalists but the inner festering violence of failed, frustrated, unhappy people. It is defensible, finally, because it is very, very funny.

Characterization

The characterization of the play weaves the social picture in perfect tandem with the real social classes in the Australian society. The characters are representatives of the young professionals, the teachers, the psychologist, the artist who are often called ‘the sons of ocker’. They have money, social status and share their own political ideas but they have also the capacity to be reduced to the Australian vulgarity in their drunkenness.

Williamson does not resort to satire to present his characters, plagued with multiple obsessions and hypocrisies. Rather he chooses to be compassionate in his characterization. As Katherine Brisbane notes in her review of Don’s Party,

The voting counts, which crackle from the television throughout the evening, capture in a single image the author’s compassionate view of these friends; he shares with them their hopes, their fiery façade, their faded radicalism.

The central character of the play whose political views about the Labor Party and his throwing a party anticipating the victory of the Labor party in the 1969 Federal Election is the cornerstone of the play. Don is a school teacher and his ambition of being the writer of the Great Australian Novel is rejected. He is struggling with his social life in a relaxed yet deflated way. He becomes the subject of ridicule for Cooley who questions his ability to become a writer.

Don’s University mentor, Mal boasts off his great political ideals but he is the one who has compromised his political ideology a lot. When confronted with this hypocrisy, he retorts aggressively to cope up with this public shame. Another of Don’s companion, Mack, who claims that he has left his wife while the reality is his wife has left him, is also a portrayal of shamelessness and he is put under scanner by Cooley. Mack is a designer engineer who likes to take pornographic photos of his wife.

Cooley’s introduction to the party has the same effect which the play initially brought while it was premiered in the Australian theatre world. The play has a texture of fun and obscenity underlining the failures and compromise of the middle life. Cooley also appeared as a perfect portrayal of the Australian intellectual larrikin who brings in frankness and honesty mixed up with shamelessness in the party. He is a lawyer. He is a womanizer and came with his nineteen- year old girlfriend, Susan in the party. He is enviable among his male companions and simultaneously adorable among the women in the party. He is a happy-go-lucky person who is a protagonist in his own way, though the play is named after Don Henderson.

The representation of the women characters in the play apparently seems to be misanthropic by some critics. But Williamson defends his presentation on the ground that this was the reality of the women’s condition in Australia in 1969 as the women did not have their own voice and were dominated by the patriarchy of their husbands and male partners. Though, we can find the women’s perspective to the Australian male world when they are found to indulge in their shared suffering.

The Structure

The play is presented in a way so that it seems that the movement and actions of the play are spontaneous and open-ended. In this perspective, the play has not any formal plot with a clear beginning, middle and end. Rather a careful study of the play traces an emotional pattern which is represented in the delineation of the hopes and ambitions of the young professionals and the subsequent disappointments. This pattern of raising hopes and suffering disappointments are played out at every level. From the political perspective, the play begins with the anticipation of the victory of the Labor Party which is frustrated when it becomes clear that it is the Liberal Party which is gaining the majority. In the lives of the characters, each of them has their own individual ambition to gain fame and finance which gets thwarted in their middle life. Even in the party, the sexual advances of the men towards the women are not finally fulfilled. Therefore, the disillusionments played out at every micro and macro levels of the drama create a gloomy atmosphere. But depression is relieved often as it is presented in the frame of humour.

The comic feeling of the play is oozed out through the varied foibles and obsessions of the male and female characters. Cooley is the funniest of them all with his obsessive preoccupations with the fundamentals like fucking and excreting. The comic texture of the play is enriched with Kerry’s obsession with ‘meaningful’, ‘organic’ relationships, Mal’s helpless indulgence in cracking-on, Mack’s preoccupation with his kinkiness and Jody’s disruptive frankness which is full of pathos.

The play along with another of Williamson’s play, The Removalist have contributed in bringing in the New Wave of Australian drama in the 1970s. It does away any kind of formal structuring of the play and in consequence, does not have a traditional plot structure, as discussed above. The dramatist follows only a basic unity of time and place as nothing happens in a sense. John Elsom praises the play as a technical feat which comes out as very funny in its surface and presented with a sense of precise timing. The themes in the play are dovetailed finely with the emotional pattern of the play and that evinces the craftsmanship of David Williamson as a playwright.

What We Have Learnt?

European plays came to Australia with arrival of the First Fleet. The effect of the European dramatic tradition in the development of the Australian theatre has been remarkable. After the Federation, the Australian playwrights of the European descent have begun to quest for the Australian themes in writing their plays. In the 1970’s, a bunch of Australian playwrights of the European descent emerged who presented the ‘Australian uniqueness’ through their plays. David Williamson is the most powerful representative face of the Australian theatre world who has been continuing in writing plays till now. Williamson is a topical playwright whose theatrical vision offers a penetrating insight into the social and cultural landscape of the Australian Middle class. One of the pressing concerns of Williamson in writing his plays is how people cope up with the social life and how they struggle with their frustrations and failures when they get together somewhere. Don’s Party is no exception in this case.

The play set on the 1969 election night has a direct reference to the Australian Election in 1969 in which Liberal Party got the victory over the Labor Party. But the focus of the play zooms in more on the party at Don’s home which exposes the social frustrations and compromises on the one hand and the struggles to survive to the expectations of the public life on the other. The drunken ribaldry, sexual licentiousness and social vulgarity expose the dark sides of the Australian middle class life. In a mixture of humour and pathos, comedy and confession, the play represents the Australian life in the 1970s. The play is one of the representative productions in David Williamson’s oeuvre.

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Reference

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