70s suburban conformity put under the microscope

Don’s Party captured the enduring anxieties of election nights in the Australian psyche; that sense that the world could change overnight if we drunkenly barracked hard enough.

From left, actors Graeme Blundell, Veronica Lang, Ray Barrett, Pat Bishop and John Hargreaves in a scene from the 1976 film Don's Party.

David Williamson’s Don’s Party was a play just ahead of the zeitgeist, capturing the enduring anxieties of election nights in the Australian psyche, especially for Labor voters; that sense that the world could actually change overnight if we drunkenly barracked hard enough for change.

It caustically summed up that excruciating uncertainty of the night that became consuming and prolonged, eventually leaving us too afraid to hope.

In particular Williamson, with what became his crowd-pleasing satirical cleverness, dramatised the growing desire for change that would see Whitlam triumph in 1972. And he did it with a caustic wit and dazzling stagecraft that astonished at the time. (When he began writing plays, he was lecturing in thermodynamics at Swinburne Technical College.)

It smacked of authenticity too, identifying a progressivism slowly taking hold in the middle class world, a growing desire for social and political reform. Many of the events in the play were actually borrowed from various parties Williamson had thrown over preceding election years, especially a state election event plundered and transmuted “with the opportunism that characterises my profession”, in 1967.

The play is, of course, an 87-minute study of social interactions, male misbehaviours, rituals and beer-fuelled ceremonies raucously demonstrated during a suburban election-eve party on October 25 for the 1969 federal election.

The party is held by Don Henderson and his long-suffering wife, Kath, who are joined by their group of sex-obsessed male friends and their despairing wives, to celebrate the highly anticipated victory of Gough Whitlam over John Gorton. The sexual and then political intertwine to the confronting sound of bedroom doors banging, testosterone-driven men clashing in frustration, and the cutting dialogue of disappointed women.

Don’s Party was first performed at Melbourne’s Pram Factory in Carlton, a one-time brothel, German Club and a boxing ring as well as a dance hall. When you got sick of dancing you took your girl out the back to look at the fights, the old timers said. It became home to an ad hoc bunch of theatrical misfits, deadly serious about making theatre that was political, popular and experimental.

Playwright David Williamson at the North Fitzroy Arms hotel in Melbourne.

Sometimes the Pram seemed to outsiders like a self-perpetuating organism whose existence was more important than any work it performed, its sense of mission less theatrical than evangelical.

Its theatre of commitment was often a theatre of narrow slogans; writers who refused to try to change were often held in contempt, and there were, sometimes, assaults on any expression that was not a form of consent. The debates were endless, the marriages weren’t. There was pain and heartbreak, joy and delight; like it can be in relationships, if we didn’t make up after disagreements, we just got used to the way we disappointed each other.

Don’s Party arrived just as Williamson was becoming the face of underground theatre, wryly ironic, that lanky someone he described as “the engineer from Bundoora,” an outer Melbourne suburb.

He had emerged with successful plays around the corner at the La Mama Theatre, like Stork and The Removalists. A middle class denizen of the outer suburbs, he was suddenly, he wrote later, “one of the gun playwrights of Carlton”, a counter culture hero, at least to some. Many were hostile to this jumped-up antipodean Ibsen, who it was said used a tape recorder to write his plays.

I directed the production but it was a tiresome battle to gain acceptance from the combative, bellicose crowd.

The play wasn’t experimental enough; old fashioned realism it didn’t attempt to raise drama out of its irrelevance or push back the frontiers of drama and life; its political consciousness needed raising. Williamson from the beginnings of his long career has long been a magnet for hostility and critical disdain.

He still remembers with some fearfulness wandering into a rehearsal and was shocked to hear some of the cast “expressing disgust that they were being asked to stoop to kitchen sink naturalism when they joined the group to create art”. But I could see it was, as David said, a highly constructed artefact and hardly a mere slice of life.

But Don’s Party’s accessibility for audiences, caustic comedy, the instant gasp of idiomatic recognition its dialogue produced, the almost cinematic series of scenes, exuberant, sometimes toxic jokes and blackout lines flipping into place as each scene accelerates the plot, made it a hit.

Actors John Hargreaves, Ray Barrett, Graham Kennedy and Harold Hopkins.

Its success helped define the destiny of the company. Williamson was soon expelled for not attending the required number of collective meetings and so was I.

Several years later I appeared in Bruce Beresford’s successful 1976 movie version of the play after it had been performed both in Sydney and London.

The highly efficient ensemble cast also included Ray Barrett in an edgy performance as the aggressive Mal, Don’s best mate, and Graham Kennedy as Mack, another old friend with a liking for photographing his wife with other men. Both are dead now but what actors they were.

I appear also as Simon, one of two young Liberals invited; it’s a strange performance characterised by a safari suit, a satin cravat, a strange comb-over and some very good Williamson lines. Simon is an introverted and timid plastic manufacturer, attending the party with Jody, his overdressed wife who votes Liberal because she loathes the sound of, and images she gets from, the word “Labor”.

The movie, like the play, simply and comically placed Australia’s suburban conformity under the microscope. And while some critics missed the point – critics were already moaning about what shallow cultural statements our movies made about this country – the public didn’t. It remains a little classic.

Williamson’s variations on classic themes of hypocrisy and gullibility, and the customary set pieces, so well-orchestrated by Beresford and photographed by Don McAlpine, growing from the motivations of characters who are recognisable and funny but also sad and muddled.

These days Williamson still sees Don’s Party as an accurate reflection of the attitudes of the time.

“The sexual freedom vibes of San Francisco’s ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967 were just filtering through into the Australian consciousness; the pill had recently become available for women, and men in particular thought our repressed and dreary suburban conformity was about to erupt into joyous, guilt-free sex and fun times promiscuity,” he says. Suddenly it was chic to use the f-word and worse.

“The grinding treadmill of capitalist production and consumption was now under challenge and the more gullible of us believed peace would guide the planets and love would steer the stars,” Williamson says.

As he suggests, such delusions were short-lived and the only part of that dream that seemed to impinge on the males at Don’s Party was the sexual freedom bit: “Their political hopes were genuinely high for a change of government after a long period of conservative rule but in truth the hopes for a Labor win were more akin to a hope that one’s football team would beat the opposition than any deep conviction and commitment to social change.”

As critic Peter Craven suggests, Don’s Party is “a constant reminder that the free and easy sexual mores which in some ways tend to be taken for granted today were fought for sometimes grittily and sometimes barbarically in the days of wife swapping and masculine self-centredness”.

Beresford’s 1976 movie adaptation is of course a sort of perennial, appearing on our screens at election times.

“I’ve even got emails from people I don’t know who have Don’s Party election nights and dress up as their favourite characters from the film,” Williamson says. “That’s real fame, I guess.”