David Williamson's the Club
THE CLUB BY DAVID WILLIAMSON TEACHER’S NOTES BY PETER FITZPATRICK CurrenCy Press STUDY GUIDE The performing arts publisher www.currency.com.au DAVID WILLIAMSON’S THE CLUB by Peter Fitzpatrick . Introducing the play 1 2. The playwright comments 1 3. The critics’ views 1 4. Questions for discussion 1 5. Further reading 1. Introducing the play disparaged, figure in contemporary Australian theatre. He is, in a non-pejorative sense, an old- In 1976 some jeremiahs greeted the news fashioned playwright; his plays are not avant- that Australia’s most popular playwright was garde in their forms or expectations, and only working on a play about football—Australia’s in his unexpurgated dialogue does he take any most consuming form of popular theatre—with developed advantage of the freedoms won for his mutterings about the dangers of sacrilege, or generation of writers. All his plays are naturalistic of pandering to the public. But it didn’t take in form, suited to the proscenium stages and an expert to tip the success of The Club at the convincingly solid sets of the subsidised State box office. The degree of success has, however, companies who have found a new Williamson play exceeded anyone’s expectations, even in a godsend. Melbourne, the football culture in which the play Williamson’s earliest work was performed in is set. The Club, in its premiere season which 1970 at the tiny La Mama theatre in Melbourne, opened on 24 May 1977 at the Russell Street perhaps the main focus of the so-called ‘new Theatre, played to packed houses for an extended wave’ in Australian theatre in the late 1960s and four-month run, and brought unprecedented early 1970s; but since 1971, when The Removalists profits to the Melbourne Theatre Company; and Don’s Party were taken up by ‘establishment’ twenty months later it was back again, the laughs companies, all of his plays have first appeared in and full houses showing no signs of flagging.
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