David Williamson playwright retires, wrote Emerald City
After 50 years David Williamson has written his last ever play. He talks first night nerves and why he still fears the critics, writes Leo Schofield.
Wentworth Courier
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Towards the end of 1970, the late Ken Horler, a barrister with a grand passion for the theatre, happened upon a disused shed in an insalubrious laneway off Nimrod Street, Darlinghurst, and arranged a lease. There, in late 1970, Horler, John Bell and Richard Wherrett built and launched a new theatre and formed a resident company.
Initially known as the Nimrod, later rebadged The Stables and currently known as The Griffin, it was, is and surely will continue to be, a proving ground for new Australian writing.
In October the following year, a new Australian play was given its Sydney premiere. It had already been seen in Melbourne where it had created a sensation. I was in the audience that night and I can attest to its impact, like a violent punch to the gut. It dealt with subjects that were pretty much taboo at the time, domestic violence and the then unmentionable corruption within the police force. The play was The Removalists. And the playwright? A 28-year old Melburnian, David Williamson.
Today, almost 50 years later, Williamson has come full circle, back to the site of his first triumph in the town he dubbed Emerald City. He is here in Sydney for the rehearsals and opening night of Family Values, his newest play, an Australian premiere at the Griffin Theatre, and we are lunching nearby, at that terrific Indian restaurant, Malabar.
This new play is, according to the Griffin management, Williamson “at his angry best: furious that his generation has retired from defending the socially compassionate values on which they claim to have built this country.” It may not sound like a barrel of laughs but the opening night audience found nuggets of laughter in its 95 minute duration that managed to reference migrant detention, gender stereotypes, internecine family conflicts, climate change, consumerism, same sex marriages and relationships and happy-clappy evangelical Christian cults.
But there is more. Williamson is putting down his literary pen and has written his last ever play – Crunch Time — for which he has chosen the The Ensemble in Kirribilli for its premiere.
To describe Williamson as prolific is an understatement. He is the most produced playwright in the history of Australian theatre. At last reckoning, he has written more than 50 stage works, movie screenplays and TV miniseries. In the Anglophone world only British playwright Alan Ayckbourn tops this tally.
In Williamson’s case this prodigious output doesn’t include drafts. Is it a tyranny?
“Well look, for 50 years now I’ve really enjoyed wrestling with a blank screen and finding something to fill it. I typically do 12 or 15 drafts. The first draft is usually chaotic. The kick comes not when you’re writing but when you get it in front of an audience, eight good actors and a good production and you feel the connection happening. I’ve been addicted to that for 50 years.”
The flip side has been the private struggle he has had with putting his work out there in front of the public – and the critics.
“It’s a tense life. People do not realise that if you are, say, a brain surgeon, you do not tremble when you open the papers to see if people like your work. The visibility is sometimes daunting. People who do not experience public criticism of what they do, don’t know what it’s like.”
“There was a stage in my career when I was too anxious to go to first nights. My wife, Kristen, was my proxy. She would go to the ladies at interval and listen to what people were saying and report back if they liked it.
“The thing that has kept me going is the consistency of the public response. For 50 years they have kept coming. My works seem to connect with the audience. But it’s time. I don’t want to be staggering around at 99 going to theatres that are only one-third full.”
Of never again writing another play, and of his approaching last first night, his feelings are still swirling. “It will be a moment of sadness and of celebration. The 50 year ordeal will be over.”
In life, timing is everything and in Williamson’s case his timing has been exquisite. He arrived on the scene in the 1970s. Australians in all branches of the performing, visual and literary arts were shucking off the heavy cloak of colonialism and finding inspiration in the world around them, here in Australia rather than in the Old Dart.
There had been earlier murmurings. Sumner Locke Elliott’s Rusty Bugles in 1948 followed 10 years later by Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, set on Anzac Day and dealing with intergenerational conflict, but these were isolated successes rather than harbingers of a full-scale New Wave. Authors of both these quondam hit plays were but two of many talented theatre professionals forced to abandon Australia in the 1940s and 1950s in search of an artistic living overseas.
But by the time Williamson happened on the scene, the cultural cringe had all but evaporated, a new era in Aussie theatre was dawning, and in the very vanguard of the movement was Australia’s very own Angry Young Man, the 20-something David Williamson.
Born in a middle class suburb in Melbourne, Williamson moved with his family to Bairnsdale in East Gippsland.
A hint of parallel, but discrete, career direction might be had from the fact that while studying mechanical engineering at Monash University, Williamson often had a copy of one of Chekov’s plays open on his knees under the desk.
“After Monash I went to Swinburne to do what I was really interested in and that’s psychology. In my fourth year I specialised in social psychology. That’s when the plays began to take off.”
His career may not have taken off quite so rapidly had it not been for the existence of two trailblazing Melbourne theatre institutions. The Pram Factory and La Mama, both associated with powerful women.
The Pram Factory was, as you might imagine, established in an old pram factory in Carlton. A radical alternative theatre group collective, it embodied the raffish, anarchic spirit of the inner city suburb where it was located. By the time the site was demolished in 1980 it had acquired the status of legend.
La Mama has proved to be the great survivor of Australian theatre. Williamson, Jack Hibbert and John Romerl all cut their teeth there, as did actors Cate Blanchett, Graeme Blundell, Judith Lucy, and Julia Zemiro,
Initially, La Mama was where Williamson went to premiere his first hit. “The Removalists was actually written after the draft of Don’s Party but I couldn’t interest anybody in producing it. The collective that ran La Mama thought it too bourgeois.”
He recalls the source of inspiration: “I was moving house and travelling around with a removalist because it was cheaper if I helped him and he told me about an experience he’d had the previous Friday when the police intervened in a domestic dispute. What intrigued me was that he was completely indifferent to the police beating this guy up.”
So, the story was an old fashioned, slice-of-life drama but startlingly real on stage because of the brilliant cast assembled for his debut at Nimrod – Don Crosby as the older sergeant, the magnificent young Max Phipps as the new copper, Jackie Weaver, Carol Skinner, Chris Haywood and Martin Harris. Not quite the “eight good actors” he specifies as essential to success, a mere six — but all crackerjack performers. We share a particular admiration for Phipps, no longer with us, but unforgettable at Nimrod and subsequently on the screen as Toadie in Mad Max 2.
Given his way with words, he’s a somewhat reluctant conversationalist. He speaks in a measured manner, calm and with an even tone, although things sped up a little when the food begins to arrive.
Now I’ve had dozens of these lunches and Williamson is far and away the most appreciative guest I’ve had. Our conversation is peppered with exclamations of delight, before we continue.
“I still feel great affection for Melbourne,” says Williamson. “One of my sons still lives there with his family and I often go down to visit them.”
But it can also be bleak. And many Melburnians make an annual migration to Queensland. Williamson’s reputation may have been cemented in Sydney and Melbourne, but for the past couple of decades he and Kristin have called Noosa home.
“Queenslanders didn’t know what they had there until Melburnian émigrés, fleeing winter cold, started coming up and buying up the place. Hastings Street is now known as South Yarra-on-Sea.”
One of Williamson’s sons (between them, Williamson and Kristin have five children and 14 grandchildren) son, Rory, studied at NIDA but found the life of an actor too precarious. Property in Noosa has proved a better bet. Felix, however, is still in the acting business.
Subscribing to the view that if you take something from a place you should put something back, the Williamsons, 17 years ago, inaugurated and funded a boutique festival in Noosa. “Paradise it may be but unless you put back into the community you’re little more than a permanent tourist.”
“ Although the image of Noosa is sybaritic – food, sun and surf – we realised that there was a large number of people there who are passionate about the arts.” Thus 2002 saw the inaugural Noosa Long Weekend, now renamed Noosa Alive.
One of the early festivals offered a rare glimpse of Williamson as actor in one of his plays. He managed to forget his lines and his NIDA graduate sons promptly dubbed him Westinghouse because he froze on stage.
The month sees another tiny festival of sorts, A Festival of Williamson, with two new plays opening in Sydney, the aforementioned Family Values and Crunch Time at the Ensemble Theatre, which is scheduled to travel to Noosa as the centrepiece of this year’s festival. Then, by way of a last hurrah before embracing retirement, there are revivals of Emerald City in both Sydney and Melbourne.
We have touched on critics (he loathes them, Government funding for the arts (generally lousy “but Victoria more open-handed than New South Wales”) and the national broadcaster (“most politicians hate the ABC because sometimes they come up with a dissenting voice,”) but time’s up and he needs to be back in the rehearsal room.
He rises to the impressive full, lanky two metre plus basketball height that makes him such a totemic presence in many an opening night foyer and promptly departs.
I watch him heading up the hill and am surprised to see that no one recognises him. But then, it’s actors that the public usually coos over while writers continue to slave away on their 13th – or is it the 15th? – draft, fretting over the words they put into the mouths of the mummers.
Crunch Time runs at the Ensemble Theatre. Kirribilli from Feb 14 - Apr 9. Family Values runs at the Griffin Theatre until March 7.