David Williamson parties on

FORTY years on and people still get worked up about David Williamson. Why is the nation's most successful playwrightsuch a lightning rod?

david Williamson

I'M sitting opposite David Williamson, talking to his right ear. We are in a small Italian restaurant on the fringe of Sydney's CBD, and the playwright, his long legs crossed, sits side-on to the table, which is barely big enough to hold two pasta bowls.

Williamson scrupulously avoids eye contact, directing his answers to some empty chairs on the other side of the restaurant. I am instantly reminded of a story by a theatre insider who knows him well: that to protect himself from unwanted advances from women, the dramatist used to turn himself into "the most boring man in the room". One of his tactics was to never look a predatory woman in the eye.

What about critics? Not long after he orders the house-made ravioli, Williamson reminds me that I am among those former drama critics who once gave him a hard time. I hazily recall writing one, maybe two negative reviews of Williamson plays almost 20 years ago. As the dramatist continues to answer my questions while fixing his gaze on the middle distance, I can only assume I haven't been forgiven.

Williamson's sensitivity to negative criticism is legendary, as are his public bust-ups with his adversaries inside the theatre world. I ask him whether he is thin-skinned. "Oh yeah," he deadpans, pausing for comic effect, "not nearly as much as [British playwright] David Hare." He laughs, a light, self-deprecating chuckle. "I try not to worry about it . . . but look, the average brain surgeon doesn't wake up in the morning to see 300,000 people reading that he botched his first operation . . . you have to be fairly thick-skinned not to feel denigrated by some of the things people say."

This year Williamson marks 40 years since his breakout plays, Don's Party and The Removalists, were first produced on Melbourne's influential, ideologically hardline alternative theatre scene. Since then, the former teacher of an unfashionable subject (thermodynamics) from an unfashionable place (mortgage-belt suburbia) has gone on to write more than 40 plays and to collaborate on screenplays for regarded films such as Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously and Balibo. He has won 12 Australian Writers Guild (AWGIE) prizes, five AFI awards and is an intimate of prime ministers and Booker prize-winning novelists.

For most of his career he towered over the stage like an antipodean Colossus, albeit one who often seemed ill at ease in his exceptionally tall frame. His crackling one-liners about everything from marital infidelity to the politics of football bankrolled the subsidised theatre for two decades: according to one estimate, between the 1980s and turn of the century, his plays turned over $20 million at the Sydney Theatre Company alone.

His most popular comedies of manners, such as The Club, Emerald City, Money and Friends and Influence, strangely alive with the brutal economy and rude humour of the Australian idiom, frequently drew more people to our theatres than Shakespeare. Seven of his plays were made into films and in 2002 Madonna starred in a London production of his drama about the venality of the art world, Up for Grabs. (He wasn't exactly starstruck. In an email to his wife, Kristin, he said the meta-celebrity was "a horror" during rehearsals and "questions every line".)

Former drama critic Katharine Brisbane, who was Williamson's first publisher at Currency Press, says of the playwright's four-decade career: "I think he has been successful for longer than any other playwright has been in our history . . . and the audiences still like him." Williamson's biographer, Brian Kiernan, concurs: "I certainly wouldn't be the first to say that without David Williamson we would never have had the mainstream Australian theatre we have enjoyed since the early 1970s."

Williamson is a grandfather of nine and, although a heart condition forced him into temporary retirement several years ago, he looks younger than he is. He is trim and lightly tanned, while his large eyes, sheltered by a prominent brow, still have a bewildered, boyish quality. Next month the Noosa Longweekend arts festival, which Williamson helped establish, will feature a 40th anniversary tribute dinner for the playwright, as well as the premiere of a new play, At Any Cost?, which he co-wrote.

While the flagship state theatre companies are no longer jostling for the first rights to the latest Williamson, three new works by the veteran playwright (including the recently produced Don Parties On) will be staged this year, a level of exposure younger, more vogueish playwrights can only fantasise about. Swigging Italian mineral water, he tells Review the excitement of seeing new plays rehearsed "is no less than it was all those years ago and really keeps me going".

Sandra Bates, co-artistic director of Sydney's Ensemble Theatre, who is directing At Any Cost?, confirms that the playwright still sits in on rehearsals, roaring with laughter as the actors bring his gags to life.

Yet during our interview Williamson often comes across as lugubrious and slightly wounded, even as he points out he has had a fortunate career. On the one hand, he insists: "I've led a blessed life in so many ways. I've been through 44 rehearsal periods working with actors and directors who've been a joy to work with, and I've had 44 opening nights; I've had audiences stick with me through all these years."

On the other hand, the man who created a micro-economy within the subsidised theatre known as "the Williamson economy", holds forth at length about the vitriol and hatred of some critics and the judgmentalism of those who denigrate the genre he made his own: social comedies about middle-class Australians. "What is it that engenders this level of, well, hatred?" he asks of his more ferocious critics. He sounds genuinely puzzled as he points out: "In my mind all I have done for the last 40 years is to write perceptive, intelligent analyses of middle-class, social behaviour ...  I cannot see what enormous crime I have committed in some people's eyes. It seems over the top."

It's true that through the years Williamson has been the target of some gratuitous and vicious attacks. He has been derided not just for what he writes but because of his commercial success and prominence within the culture. As Kiernan diplomatically puts it: "In any artistic field (just think of the killing fields of the novel or poetry), the success of an individual can incite envy and resentment in others and cloud their critical judgment."

In 1998, writer and professional ratbag Bob Ellis made unsubstantiated claims on ABC radio, alleging Williamson had stolen the idea for The Removalists from an actors' workshop. Williamson said the allegations were untrue, and so did one of the key actors who appeared in the original production. When challenged, Ellis admitted he could not remember who told him about The Removalists allegation. "I did not err in remembering what may have been told to me by a liar," Ellis insisted. Williamson thought about suing, but was advised this would turn Ellis into a "hangdog martyr".

This was not the first time Ellis had launched an unprovoked attack on Williamson, his one-time friend. In 1977, he vilified the dramatist in the now-defunct Nation Review, condemning his character, screenplays and accusing him of not doing enough to promote his (Ellis's) career, before admitting, in true ratbag fashion: "Why am I writing this? Envy, I guess." (Kristin Williamson struck back on her husband's behalf and the altercation continued over several editions.)

Don's Party is now regarded as a classic. Yet Graeme Blundell says that when he directed the first production of this raucous, election-eve comedy 40 years ago, his cast from the Australian Performing Group was hostile towards the play. The APG, a socialist collective, thought Don's Party was too bourgeois and anti-women. Some cast members "were quite hateful about it", recalls Blundell. "David was not liked by the Carlton group [APG] at that stage."

Williamson has said of working with the collective: "I hated it. Every minute of it."

These anecdotes illustrate how Williamson is arguably our most loved yet most disparaged, most produced yet most resented playwright. They help illuminate a striking paradox: that the nation's most successful dramatist cannot enjoy his success -- at least, not to the extent one would expect -- because negative criticism from critics and others clearly gets under his skin, and festers.

Bates believes that for someone who has been in the public eye for so long, "he's never really built up the carapace of toughness. He appears to have done so, and he tries to, but he's human." In a 1998 profile, author David Marr highlighted some of the playwright's key contradictions: "[He is] rock confident of his talent but uncertain of his achievement, unassuming but needing to be carefully stroked."

It's no exaggeration to say this chronicler of middle-class foibles has attracted controversies as regularly as American televangelists do infidelity scandals. Sometimes these stoushes are self-created, such as when he grabbed Sydney critic James Waites by the throat and forced him over a grand piano at the Adelaide Festival Centre. (Waites says: "I don't have any recall of the incident, but we are really good friends now.")

In 1991, convinced some influential critics had it in for him, Williamson faxed five reviewers (including me) just before his play Money and Friends was due to open, asking for a fair go. The media had a field day and Williamson now admits this appeal to critics was "ill-judged. To try to influence critics' opinion before the play is not something you should do and I wouldn't do it if I had my time over again".

While Williamson's clashes with reviewers often betray his hypersensitivity, the gratuitous attacks on him only exacerbate this tendency. Indeed, he continues to be pilloried for the way his plays appeal to mainstream audiences. On the news website Crikey, journalist Guy Rundle recently sniffed that Williamson's plays "speak to people who like butter chicken and Kenny G". In a program note praising a new play dealing with the greed-is-good 1980s, Sydney's Belvoir theatre dramaturg Eamon Flack sneered: "The Business is the play that the quintessential Australian playwright David Williamson never had the stomach to write." (The Business is in fact based on a Maxim Gorky play written 100 years ago, and Williamson deals with materialism and greed in several of his works.)

Williamson says philosophically that "the theatre is a particularly judgmental arena, I do think it is. Some people have very fixed ideas on what theatre should be." He introduces Barrie Kosky -- the avant-garde director who once implied Williamson was past his use-by date -- into the conversation. Even when I laugh knowingly about him pressing on this old wound, he persists.

His voice wobbling with mock indignation, he says: "When I voiced a small criticism of Barrie Kosky, the howls of rage! ...  Given the fact Kosky was attacking me vehemently for 10 to 15 years at every possible opportunity, I finally say, 'Well look, I think Barrie's got a very fertile, powerful theatrical imagination, sometimes I wonder whether it all adds up to anything' ...  It was as if I attacked Jesus or something, among the theatrical cognoscenti. So, yes, I think the theatre's a very ideologically polarised place."

Earlier this year, a sequel to Don's Party, Don Parties On, was staged in Melbourne and Sydney. In a now-notorious review of the sequel, Crikey critic Jason Whittaker took apart the play -- and the playwright. He wrote that "Williamson hasn't demonstrated intelligence or intellectual curiosity for years" and that the dramatist's writing was "fat, lazy and stupid".

ABC political pundit Annabel Crabb weighed in, arguing that "implacable hatred" of the dramatist "seems of late to have become an article of faith for the serious theatregoer". Well-known figures from former prime minister Bob Hawke to conservative columnist Miranda Devine also defended the playwright.

Is Williamson a victim of the tall-poppy phenomenon? Because his plays have proved so bankable, did he end up becoming over-exposed and therefore resented? Or does this ultimate cultural insider create a false narrative of himself as the persecuted outsider?

Alison Croggon, a former Melbourne theatre critic for The Australian and a renowned blogger, argues that "he has come in for some harsh criticism, but I think that's true of anybody who has put stuff out there, frankly".

Croggon certainly doesn't hold back. In 2008 she called the Williamson play Scarlett O'Hara at the Crimson Parrot "a dog".

She denies she has a problem with commercial theatre; she is a fan of British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, for instance. But she argues the later Williamson plays are badly written, formulaic and burdened with characters that are shallow stereotypes. "For me it comes down to that ...  I don't enjoy that kind of play." She believes Williamson gets as many positive as negative reviews, "but there's always been a focus on the negative ones because, I assume, he's very sensitive about them, which I have never understood".

The critic also argues that by the time the playwright temporarily retired in 2005, "Williamson was the benchmark to which everyone was aspiring and that was the only thing being considered good in the mainstream". She says this exposed the main theatre companies' conservatism rather than any failing on Williamson's part. But, still, the dominance of one playwright "seemed to me deeply disturbing, and a problem, though things have changed in the past few years".

Brisbane agrees Williamson "actually created the Australian industry and became a captive of it ...  [the Williamson hits] were a river of gold and to have broken with that pattern at that time would have been a very courageous act, but perhaps not sensible." Unlike Croggon, she believes Williamson is a "great craftsman" and that audiences have loved "the shock of recognition" his dramas deliver. "We could laugh at and with the characters but it has gone on for 40 years and so there are some who think they've had enough of it."

Former STC artistic director Wayne Harrison says the Williamson oeuvre contains "highs and lows, but it's essential work: local stories told in local voices". Some observers, reflects Harrison, claim "his early works [pre-1980] are superior to the later, but any body of work that contains The Perfectionist, Emerald City, Money and Friends, Dead White Males, After the Ball and A Conversation is not to be sneezed at. I'd be proud to have written those plays."

Harrison fell out spectacularly with Williamson when he directed the dramatist's 1996 play Heretic, about a Canberra academic's attempts to debunk the ideas of anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Williamson hadn't bothered to attend most of the rehearsals and shortly before opening night was horrified to discover that Harrison's production had Mead metamorphosing into Jackie Kennedy, Barbra Streisand and Marilyn Monroe, none of whom featured in the script. He was so upset he considered taking out an injunction against the STC to halt the production.

Again, this dispute became a media sensation, but the show went on and the antagonists eventually made up and worked together on a subsequent production, Third World Blues. Harrison has "no hard feelings" about their quarrel, "although I did hate the fact that audiences stopped coming to the Drama Theatre to enjoy the play ...  and came to enjoy the controversy instead".

Blundell, now The Australian's television critic, is unsure about Williamson's claim he has been unfairly treated: "The irony is that he has outlasted nearly all the critics across 40 years, his plays are still performed, he's on school syllabuses, the controversies around him still circle." Blundell thinks of Williamson as a popular entertainer who enjoys a stoush. "He relishes it," he says, "we all relish it. It keeps him absolutely firing."

Williamson denies this, explaining his premature retirement was caused by a serious heart condition, arrhythmia, brought on by the pressures of being a playwright.

On several occasions he was rushed to hospital. He reveals: "It was stress-related and I thought, 'Oh dear, I'd rather stay alive.' There is a lot of stress involved in writing a play, getting it ready through rehearsals, through its reception and all of that ...  I thought I'd better give it up. But then the medical profession found a very effective drug and my heart hasn't missed a beat for the last six years." After a short retirement, he felt "rejuvenated" by the new drug and started writing plays again. In her biography of her husband, David Williamson: Behind the Scenes, Kristin Williamson jokes: "Even Dame Nellie had the decency to remain retired for longer than David."

It's interesting that a man who is touchy about tough criticism has been ruthless in using his family's and friends' experiences -- including the painful break-up of his and Kristin's first marriages so they could be together -- as raw material for his plays. Williamson says this hasn't cost him friends, even though Kristin writes in the biography this has sometimes upset her and her friends deeply.

The playwright responds: "I don't think I'm a nasty playwright, in the sense that I admit the humanity of characters as well as their deficiencies." He has also put some of his own bad behaviour on the stage.

Bates, whose Ensemble Theatre, a fully commercial outfit based in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Kirribilli, has provided a home for Williamson's plays in recent years, believes he is grossly under-appreciated by the subsidised theatre companies he underwrote for so long.

"We should all be ecstatic over what he has done for Australian theatre ... Anywhere else in the world he would be the most celebrated person in the country. Here, we have this absolute treasure who is used and abused. He's looked on as yesterday's man, and he isn't," she says indignantly.

Yet the dramatist betrays a fleeting sense of regret he is not as fashionable as he once was. In an unguarded moment, he says a recent London revival of works by neglected dramatist Terence Rattigan "made me feel a bit better. If you're going to be in this business you've got to accept that a lot of it's about fashion, and how could you still be fashionable at the age of 69?"

Illustrating how he is still open to new ways of working, Williamson co-wrote his forthcoming play, At Any Cost?, with Mohamed Khadra, author of popular medical books and professor of surgery at the University of Sydney.

This play explores how sophisticated medical equipment can keep gravely ill patients alive at huge cost, even if they have an appalling quality of life.

Williamson explains that "family tensions tend to emerge in a big way" when it is time to take an elderly parent off life support. In the play he creates a family feud around this heart-rending, medical dilemma, while Khadra's words animate a surgeon character who addresses the audience as if they were his students.

Does Williamson have a keen sense of his own mortality? "Oh yeah," he says emphatically. "I have just turned 69. You well and truly recognise that life is not going to go on forever and that somebody might be making those decisions [to turn off life support] about you quite shortly, though I hope not for a few years."

If he could do it all again, would he? "It's been an enormous privilege," he says of his long, eventful life in the theatre. "There are struggling writers out there who would kill for an opportunity to work with high-quality actors and directors and get their work on stage, so any negative comments I make have to be tempered by the fact that I've been extremely fortunate."

Having got through lunch without once looking in my direction, he says with equal determination: "As long as I still have the joy of getting the plays done by very good people and having people appreciate them, I'll keep doing them."

At Any Cost?, Noosa Longweekend Festival, June 21 and 22. Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, from July 7.

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WILLIAMSON AT A GLANCE
Box office hits
Emerald City
The Club
Travelling North
Money and Friends
Corporate Vibes
Amigos
Influence

Plays made into films
Stork
Don's Party
The Club
Emerald City
Sanctuary
Brilliant Lies
Travelling North

Other screenplays
Eliza Fraser
Gallipoli
The Year of Living Dangerously
(with Christopher Koch and Peter Weir)
Phar Lap
Balibo (with Robert Connolly)

Television
The Department
The Perfectionist
A Dangerous Life (for HBO)
The Four Minute Mile (BBC/ABC)
On the Beach