Playwright David Williamson brings down the curtain on a brilliant career

David Williamson is taking his final bows in Brisbane and Melbourne with a play bagging Sydney that critics consider his masterwork.

It’s an old show-business adage that you should go out on a high note and ­Australian playwright David Williamson intends to do just that. So now, as he begins celebrating his 50th year in the business, he is also calling it quits. Or so he says.

And he’s finishing with a flourish – with productions in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.

Hit black comedy Family Values is being staged right now by Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney. His incisive play Crunch Time is being done too, by Ensemble Theatre, also in Sydney, from February 14 and a major reboot of his ­classic 1987 play Emerald City will open Queensland Theatre’s (QT) 2020 season with shows beginning on February 8, with a season in Melbourne to follow. (It’s a co-production between QT and Melbourne Theatre Company.)

Williamson, who lives at Noosa with his wife Kristin, is chuffed to be having such a flurry as a finale.

David Willaimson and his wife Kristin Williamson at home. Picture: Paul Smith

By no means, though, will his threatened retirement mean an end to Williamson’s work being staged, as it is regularly, all over the country. The Williamson canon is rich and varied and someone is always putting on a Williamson play somewhere. But he says there will be no more writing. He’s 77, he will turn 78 on February 24 ... it’s enough already.

When I chat to the man regarded as Australia’s most significant, not to mention prolific, playwright, he is in Sydney working with the two companies putting on his work there and later he will head to Melbourne and then back to Brisbane for Emerald City rehearsals and openings.

“I’m going out with a bang,” Williamson says. “I’m retiring, I really am. I’d rather go out on a high note than be staggering around at 98 ­wondering why I wasn’t relevant any more. It’s time to go.”

And to concentrate on family. He has five children and 14 grandchildren who will keep him busy in retirement. The Brisbane season of Emerald City will be extra special as it will kick off Queensland Theatre’s 50th anniversary year as well as Williamson’s. The playwright is now on the board of QT, having been lured by Sam Strong, artistic director of our state company until late last year. It was a savvy move by Strong and adds kudos, not to mention cachet to opening nights when you have David Williamson in attendance, a living legend of the Australian theatre world. And you can’t miss him: the tall, lanky, friendly but sometimes slightly awkward figure who towers above us all in more ways than one.

David Williamson is going out on a high he says. Picture: Dylan Robinson

If you know your Aussie drama that may sound a bit like the lead character from his first play, The Coming of Stork. That’s a story about a socially awkward and loudly left-wing student who comes to share a flat with three of his ­university friends with disastrous results.

If you recall the movie you will recall Stork being played by the equally lofty Bruce Spence. The play debuted in September 1970 at the legendary pocket-handkerchief-sized La Mama Theatre in Melbourne, where it was an instant success. Up until then Williamson had been an engineering graduate who moved into lecturing and then started studying psychology.

“I had just been accepted for postgraduate research in psychology when Stork came out,” Williamson recalls. “People liked it and then I had to decide what to do so I took a leave of absence and suddenly my next play The Removalists also took off.”

And so the career of Australia’s greatest playwright was under way and it has spanned the decades since.

Lee Lewis, the incoming artistic director of QT, is a Williamson fan and is directing Family Values for Griffin, where she has been artistic director, before heading to Brisbane where she will inherit Sam Strong’s 2020 season before charting her own course in 2021.

Coincidentally Lewis began her career at Griffin Theatre Company in 2013 with Emerald City, a play which she says, shows “how much we haven’t changed”.

Incoming Queensland Theatre artistic director Lee Lewis is a huge Williamson fan Picture: AAP/John Gass

It’s a biting satire that skewers Sydney, the Emerald City, where the Williamsons still have a home. This play spawned by a Melburnian’s love-hate relationship with Sydney has become central to the Australian theatre canon. This partly autobiographical work about a screenwriter and his book editor wife who come to Sydney to make it, was first performed in 1987 by Sydney Theatre Company. It’s one of Williamson’s most popular works and encompasses all the best things about Williamson according to Lewis.

“It’s a wonderful play and a good example of what David does,” Lewis says. “He has been a chronicler of the Australian psyche through his work and we hear the opinions of Australians on stage and he always manages to capture the way people really talk.”

He also mines his own life and the people around him for material, not slavishly so, but enough to make some nervous.

“I’m glad I don’t live at Noosa and go to dinner parties there,” Lewis says, hinting that art may imitate life. “People love his work for that and other reasons but critics have had a problem sometimes with how popular he has been.”

Lewis agrees that celebrating QT and Williamson’s 50th anniversaries in the same year is special.

“I feel very privileged,” she says. “My job is to look forward but it’s wonderful to be honouring the past as well.”

And as each of these past 50 years has begun there has usually been a new Williamson play for us. Or more than one, because he has written more than 50 plays. Williamson himself can’t remember the exact number, there are so many.

All have made a mark and many have been famously filmed, including Stork, The Removalists, Travelling North and Don’s Party.

The 1988 film adaptation of Emerald City had a cast that featured John Hargreaves, Robyn Nevin, Chris Haywood, Nicole Kidman, Nicholas Hammond and Ruth Cracknell, stage and screen icons one and all.

Actors Nicole Kidman and John Hargreaves in 1992 film Emerald City.

Williamson has always written about human drama but his plays have always had social and political dimensions too without being preachy or polemical.

Don’s Party, which debuted in 1971, was set during the 1969 federal election and captured a moment in time. It’s a work that could (and ­perhaps should) be studied as political history as much as entertainment.

That play caused him some trouble in ­Brisbane later though, Williamson recalls.

“There was a man, a local dentist in Brisbane, who sat and watched it 16 times and noted down the blasphemies and bad language,” Williamson says. “He hated the language. Eventually the police raided it. That was my second play in Queensland and nearly my last. I’ve since put four dentist characters in my play and they have all been unpleasant.”

Williamson says his own dentist once asked him why he gave dentists such short shrift and he had to explain himself.

Brisbane has since become a happy hunting ground for him, however, and he has worked with our state theatre company throughout his career and loved Queensland so much he and wife Kristin moved to Noosa and stayed there, making forays south. Now Queensland is home.

So it seemed obvious to invite him on to the board of QT but it took a southerner to do it, and more power to Sam Strong for that. Strong is ­returning to Brisbane directing QT’s forthcoming season of Emerald City, which hasa killer cast – Nadine Garner, Jason Klarwein, Marg Downey, Ray Chong Nee, Rhys Muldoon and Megan Hind.

Strong describes the beginning of 2020 as “a festival of David Williamson” and says he is chuffed to be coming back so soon with a major Williamson work he describes as “a great portrait of the brashness of the 1980s”, one that is still relevant.

Sam Strong and David Williamson at the Bille Brown Theatre ahead of their new play Nea rer the Gods. Photo: Glenn Hunt / The Australian

“It’s brilliantly observed and it’s about that rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne and the tension between art and commerce,” Strong says. “It manages to reach across time and speak to us today of these personal dilemmas. It occupies a very significant place in Australian culture.”

Strong says he marvels at Williamson’s innate understanding of his audience.

“He has this incredible knack of knowing exactly what to do to make people laugh or feel something,” Strong says. “And it’s fun sharing a rehearsal room with David. He seems to be still having as much fun as if it’s his first time.”

Strong directed Williamson’s acclaimed play about Isaac Newton, Nearer The Gods, which starred, among others, William McInnes and Rhys Muldoon. That play was chosen to open the new Bille Brown Theatre in late 2018 and it showed Williamson at the top of his game, grappling with science and the human condition in a play that no one else could have written.

Politics, the corporate world, families, science … Williamson has covered it all in his time.

The breadth of his oeuvre is amazing and as well as plays he has written some wonderful screenplays including one for the unforgettable 1981 Peter Weir film Gallipoli.

Actors on the stage and screen love saying words that Williamson has written and he tends to attract the cream of our theatrical talent, people such as Nadine Garner, who plays Kate, the co-lead role in Emerald City.

In recent years she was acclaimed for her work on the television series The Doctor Blake Mysteries, which was cancelled following the fallout of allegations against the star of the show (and her co-star), Craig McLachlan.

Garner describes the cancellation of the show as “terribly devastating” but she’s busy nonetheless. She says she has, strangely, hardly ever been asked to do roles in Australian works.

Nadine Garner Picture: David Cook.

“So I’m very proud to be doing an Australian work that is so loved and has such kudos,” Garner says. “David Williamson is a great writer and so observant. I remember seeing Emerald City on one of its first outings and writing a paper on it at school. It has been on my mind and in my psyche for a long time. I never thought I’d be playing one of the main roles in it. I have never done a Williamson before.”

That will add another dimension to what will be quite an opening night in Brisbane. And when the great man leaves the theatre that night I’m sure there will be a standing ovation as well as perhaps a few tears. But he will be leaving on a high note.

That’s the way he wants it to be. Then he’ll have time to read all those unread books and to spend endless hours with his family. But gee, you really wouldn’t be surprised if another play came of it. Just saying. ■

EMERALD CITY, February 8 to 24, Playhouse, QPAC, $61-$92, queenslandtheatre.com.au

Queensland Theatre will celebrate its 50th anniversary on May 8 and 9 with a Celebration Gala and Celebration Performances.