Chapter Three Williamson in the Howard Years

Chapter Three Williamson in the Howard Years In 2005, David Williamson announced that Influence (2005a), produced by the Sydney Theatre Company (STC), was his last play and that he would be retiring. The news sent shockwaves through a theatre industry that had come to rely on the box office takings of the annual Williamson play. Williamson has since returned to the theatre with the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) production of Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot in 2008 and the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney’s production of Let the Sunshine in 2009. A new play, Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica, is scheduled for the Ensemble Theatre in 2010. Williamson’s contribution to the economy of Australian theatre has been considerable. Box office figures cited by theatre critic Bryce Hallett in 2005 demonstrated that since the early eighties, Williamson’s plays have made almost $20 million for the STC and $9.2 million between 1992 and 2005 for the MTC.1 These box office figures together with the quick succession of new plays have also contributed, unfairly, to perceptions that Williamson has sold out artistically, that he has dropped the radical experimental ethos of the APG that nurtured him and opted for the financial security of the popular play. This chapter traces the socially critical values that animated Williamson’s early period at La Mama and the APG to the plays of the mid- to late nineties and the first decade of the twenty-first century. In doing so, it re-opens the debate about Williamson’s relationship to the APG and the sixties as the context for his emergence as a playwright. It argues that the politics of 1968 develop in the later works into a consistent anti-neoliberal stance that critiques the failure of the left to regulate the excesses of late capitalism manifest in widespread materialism. The analysis of the later works focuses on Williamson’s contribution to dramatic literature as a satirist and social critic. 80 Radical Visions 1968–2008: The Impact of the Sixties on Australian Drama Peter Fitzpatrick’s (1987) study of Williamson’s plays and Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt’s (1988) edited collection, which both cover the period up to their publication, remain the most detailed studies of the work to date. Scholarly interest in Williamson’s later work has waned over the last two decades. Penny Gay both observes and subscribes to the paradox of the popular playwright ignored by scholars: Thus, on the one hand, Williamson is riding the crest of a long wave of popularity and box office success; on the other, it is hard to find an intellectual, an academic, or a person professionally involved in the theatre who has gone to see a recent Williamson play without having been cajoled by a free first-night ticket. (2004: 5–6) While this is an overstatement, the literary-dramatic qualities of a corpus developed over a long career warrant an overdue evaluation. Veronica Kelly refers to David Williamson as being one of the “great survivors” of the New Wave authors of the sixties and seventies and a major contributor to the formation of “an Australian canon of dramatic literature that remains very much alive”. Her description of Williamson’s plays as “didactic discussion dramas” bears further consideration for its recognition of the strong and insistent presence of the authorial point of view (1998: 3–6). He is both a social realist who aims for a high degree of referentiality between the dramatic and the actual world and a satirist who heightens the speech of characters in order to ridicule the inflated egos, narcissists, hypocrites, profiteers and social climbers that dominate Australian economic and social life. The extent to which his theatre “satirises or indulges Australian behaviour”, as Peter Fitzpatrick asks, or celebrates and mythologises its satirical targets animates the critical debate about his mid-career plays (1987: 13). McCallum (2009) begins to address recent scholarly neglect with an overview of Williamson’s theatre to 2005. In offering a critical analysis of the later Williamson plays, from Dead White Males (1995) to Influence (2005a), I argue that they are critical and imaginative reflections on the state of the nation. The chapter focuses on ironic speech and caricature, acerbic wit and sarcasm that make critical points about the harshness and aggression, the narcissism and the competitiveness that underpin the social and personal relations of contemporary urban life in Australia. *** .

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