The irresistible rise and occasional fall of David Williamson

MEMOIR: Home Truths, David Williamson, HarperCollins, $49.99

The best of David Williamson’s plays are here to stay. In 1971, Graeme Blundell directed Don’s Party at Melbourne’s Pram Factory. That depiction of people going to pieces on election night was mounted the same year as Bruce Spence’s La Mama production of The Removalists, that riveting representation of police brutality and general human baseness.

It is to David Williamson’s credit that he gives such attention to his own frailties, physical as well as moral.Credit: Wolter Peeters

If that was a dream run, it was a dream talent. Spence was also the star of the 1971 film, Stork, with Williamson’s script from his own play. By 1973, Jim Sharman was directing The Removalists at London’s Royal Court and in 1975, Michael Blakemore did Don’s Party at the same theatre.

Williamson had written The Department in 1974, with Neil Fitzpatrick as the engineering head from hell; in 1977, Frank Wilson had been the Australian rules monster in The Club, which in 1978, again with Blakemore directing, had an eight-week stint on Broadway with Fred Gwynne from The Munsters. It helped that some of his plays were filmed so that Williamson’s idiom became part of the air we breathe.

Williamson’s stupendous rise – and occasional alarming falls – are coterminous with the Australian theatre we love and loathe. Robyn Nevin, Jacki Weaver, John Bell, Max Cullen, directors from Aubrey Mellor to Rodney Fisher and Simon Phillips are all part of his high-flying success story, which he tells together with the personal life that accompanied it in Home Truths. And he tells it with a candour and a degree of colour that will rivet all comers, even if it has them gnashing their teeth.

Early on, Tom Stoppard was ringing to say how much he liked his work. Williamson laboured on a Hollywood script – never filmed – with the great Robert Altman, and he did have a screaming West End success with Madonna. Did it matter that she got him to revise the script in the direction of retribution and redemption? Well, what could “matter” mean in this vertiginous context?

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Home Truths starts engagingly with the self-portrait of a gangling 213-centimetre tall boy who doesn’t know what to do with himself. His dad is an easygoing soul, his mother, a woman of spite and ambition. Williamson says that whatever talent he has for satire comes from her and whatever sense he has of the spirit of forgiveness that underlies a deeper comedy comes from his father.

He illustrates this with a quotation from After the Ball. His excerpts work brilliantly here because they exemplify intensely personal experience, but they do get routine when they serve simply to showcase the career. On the other hand, when his sharp-tongued mother is dying and asks whether he loves her and her eyes fill with tears at his hesitation, we know we are in the presence of a writer who cares about art and truth.

Williamson falls into an engineering degree, but believes he has no talent except as a scribbler of dramatic hijinks. He marries, young, and has kids. Then he meets Kristin, and they struggle with the guilt of their affair. But after 50 years, they’re still together. He doesn’t pull his punches about this, and he outlines his own folly at the age of 45 when he falls in love with a research assistant and is about to forsake Kristin, who rapidly sorts him out.

David Williamson in 1972 watching a rehearsal of The Removalists.Credit: John Pinfold

She is a formidable presence in Home Truths. As a journalist, she becomes part of the crew convinced of the corruption of former attorney-general and High Court judge, Lionel Murphy. Williamson took her aback – together with plenty of theatre companies – when he encroached on her obsessions and wrote Sons of Cain, which seemed to carry the stench as far up as NSW premier Neville Wran.

His most notable film scripts are Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously for Peter Weir, though he falls out with Weir by shooting his mouth off about various tensions.

It becomes a pattern. When Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton take over the Sydney Theatre Company, Williamson says that all they care about are flash sets and overseas actors. Blanchett does a reading of one of his new plays – ravishingly – but there’s no longer much question of mounting a production. He also appalls Robyn Nevin by writing a scene in Nothing Personal about an old publishing dame and her acolyte, which he dreamt of having Nevin do with Blanchett.

Eventually, the play was done in 2011 at the Ensemble with Greta Scacchi as the woman who stands for literature. It’s to Williamson’s credit that he made the transition to the Ensemble when the STC turned its back on him, and he still had the support of Simon Phillips in Melbourne and Sam Strong, whose revival of Emerald City was a glittering swansong when COVID-19 closed the theatres in early 2020.

It’s to Williamson’s credit that he gives such attention to his own frailties, physical as well as moral. We learn about his atrial fibrillations, getting lost in totally dark country and the more tense moment of an apparent stroke that paralyses half his body.

Sam Strong’s revival of David Williamson’s Emerald City for the Melbourne Theatre Company was cancelled in March last year because of COVID-19. Credit: Jeff Busby

The nation’s most familiar and formidable playwright is a very dab hand at dramatising what might be depressing material. If he sometimes seems a bit cocksure about opinions he seems to have plucked from the air, you can’t complain. Maybe he spends too much time saying what a money-spinner he was, maybe he talks about success as a value in itself in a way that would embarrass the Stoppards of this world, but he also comes across as a man who cares passionately about his family, and he devotes a lot of vivid and invigorated writing to delineating their glories and sorrows.

He comes across as a likeable, flawed fellow with no more blindness than people of lesser talent. While there are plodding moments, the overall momentum is powerfully sustained. Home Truths is as much a collective portrait as a self-portrait, and anyone who picks it up is likely to be carried on by the surge and the propulsion.

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