Mates, stars pay homage to the Williamson era

Wayne Harrison, Jacki Weaver, Jack Thompson and others help David Williamson celebrate his five decades in theatre.

Friends from theatre and film salute David Williamson’s gift for sharply observed social comedy

Former Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Wayne Harrison remembers how David Williamson was once a one-man financial lifeline for the flagship company. “Many a needy project was funded during my time at STC from the flow-on of what I called the Williamson Economy,” says Harrison, who headed the company from 1990 until 1999.

Harrison worked on some of the playwright’s biggest hits, including Emerald City, Money and Friends and Dead White Males, “which, in its original STC version, played five Sydney seasons”. The former STC boss jokes that after their final collaboration, Third World Blues, opened in 1997 “David got very excited and, after the show, shouted everyone in the … bar a celebratory drink – then left without paying”.

Jack Thompson

Harrison’s tribute to Australia’s most-produced playwright – delivered by Ensemble Theatre artistic director Mark Kilmurry at a star-studded event at the Sydney venue – elicited a roar of laughter from the audience. “I was happy to pick up the tab,” Harrison wrote of the unpaid bill. “That was the least I could do to repay him for the life-changing, career-enhancing … journey he’d launched me on.”

A roll-call of legendary actors and directors who worked with Williamson during his remarkable five-decade playwriting and screenwriting career – among them Mel Gibson, Jacki Weaver, Bruce Beresford, Jack Thompson, Robyn Nevin and John Bell – took part in last week’s tribute, titled Celebrating 50 Years with David Williamson, in person, via video or written messages.

Sporting a Santa Claus beard and spectacular ponytail, Thompson, 81, said of the playwright’s first international hit, The Removalists: “I was stunned by the play.”

Plays and films written in the Australian vernacular were novel back then and, through Williamson’s writing, “it was as if someone had given me a slice of life around me”, Thompson said. He performed in the 1980 film adaptation of Williamson’s hit play, The Club, and the dialogue taught him “don’t get caught acting, just say the lines”.

Thompson in the film of Williamson’s The Club

From New York, Weaver said she’d acted in nine Williamson productions on stage and screen and “loved every minute”. The Oscar-nominated actor joked that Williamson’s scripts have “the veneer of vernacular, but they’re so witty and stylish that it’s the kind of thing that we all wish we’d had the presence of mind to say at the time, instead of thinking of it two days later”.

Williamson, 80, has won 12 AWGIE and five Australian Film Institute Awards, and officially announced his retirement in 2020 (the Ensemble’s event was delayed by the Covid pandemic). Renowned for his contemporary comedies of manners and piercing one-liners, he also wrote the screenplays for some of our most successful films, among them Gallipoli, Balibo and The Year of Living Dangerously.

Jacki Weaver has appeared in nine Williamson plays and films. Picture: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

Beresford said he is planning a film based on Williamson’s acclaimed 2018 play, Nearer the Gods, a historical work told through a modern lens about how rampant egos and professional rivalries almost derailed Isaac Newtown’s laws of motion, one of science’s key discoveries. Beresford has directed film adaptations of Don’s Party and The Club.

Former Bell Shakespeare supremo John Bell spoke at the event, which doubled as a fundraiser for an Ensemble program supporting emerging playwrights. Bell has directed five Williamson plays, and acted in one, Emerald City, in which the audience’s laughter “hit me like a rush of wind”. He said the first Williamson production he directed was The Removalists at Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre (now The Stables) and that his mother “insisted” on coming. During the performance, Bell didn’t dare look at his mum as swear words flew and “coppers kicked (the character) Kenny to death in the kitchen”. “But as the lights faded to black … she tapped my knee and whispered, ‘Darling, that was lovely!’.”

Filmmaker Bruce Beresford is planning a film based on Williamson’s play Nearer the Gods. Picture: John Feder

The speeches and jokes were interspersed with scenes from the films Gallipoli, The Club and Don’s Party, while actors including Georgie Parker, John Wood and Williamson’s sons, Felix and Rory, performed scenes from different plays.

Williamson read anecdotes from his recently published memoir, Home Truths, featuring Madonna and Germaine Greer. “To say I’m a little overwhelmed would be an understatement,” the Noosa-based playwright said.

He revealed he was told “in polite terms” by then STC co-director Cate Blanchett that “my era was over” at the company in 2008, despite his plays still performing strongly at the box office. However, he found a welcoming Sydney home at the Ensemble and said it would have been “beyond my dreams”, at age 30, to think his plays would still be staged 50 years later.