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STUDY GUIDE The performing arts publisher www.currency.com.au ’S DON’s PARTY by John McCallum

1. Introducing the play 1 2. The critics’ views 1 3. Questions for discussion 1 4. Further reading

1. Introducing the play detail which gives a ‘shock of recognition’ to audiences. All the trappings of an Australian Don’s Party arrived on the scene in middle-class, trendy party are there: the beer, the in 1972 with the same sort of impact Twisties, the home-made pizzas, the bawdy jokes that the character Cooley has when he arrives at and cracking-on by the men, the women talking the party in the play. It was energetic and fun; about their husbands in the corner (although it was exhilaratingly frank and, in the process, the details of their conversation were shocking gloriously obscene; and it deflated a lot of the to some in 1972) and the gradual decline into pretensions of the new young professionals who drunken argument. The play caused a national came to the and who are represented in wave of confession by people who said that they’d the play. Above all, for the critics and audiences been to parties just like that. at the time at least, it was Australian. As the The characters are, or were, a perfect selection critic H.G. Kippax said, ‘There isn’t a line, and not a of types of a certain class of Australians. They character, that hasn’t the ring—just off-key—of represent the new professional class of teachers, one part of Australia, larger than life.’ psychologists, lawyers and others whom one This accurate social observation of Australian social commentator has called ‘sons of ocker’. life was an important part of the play’s great They are a generation educated in the affluent appeal for audiences. By bringing together at boom years of the Menzies era, beyond the social the election night party eleven representatives and economic expectations of their parents; of a certain part of Australian society and and, some would say, beyond their own capacity allowing the grog, the sexual frustrations and to take part in civilised life. They have money, the waning political hopes to have their effects, social status and political ideas but they still the play revealed inner failings and feelings of retain much of the ‘coarse’ ocker behaviour of the disillusionment in the characters with which a Australian tradition. One English journalist has lot of people seemed to identify. The play was, said that the trouble with Australians is that you in part at least, a sociological document—which can’t tell from their behaviour or language how means that now, it may be becoming, in part at educated they are. You can see this either as a least, an historical document. This raises the first refreshing aspect of Australian egalitarianism, or a important issue in studying the play. sad comment on Australian vulgarity. The play as a social document The issue that is raised by the political and social detail in the play is: has it become dated? There can be no doubt about the accuracy of the Certainly a theatre doing the play now would play’s comment. The political detail behind it is have difficulty making some of the references described by H.G. Kippax in his introduction to and some of the jokes work on stage. Memories the published script. (In fact the election, and of the DLP, Vincent Gair, John Gorton and John the rising and falling hopes for a Labor victory, McEwen fade with each passing year, and since provide the play’s central metaphor, as we shall the play first appeared Gough Whitlam has come see below.) But there is also a great deal of social and gone. Even Bob Hawke will presumably one

 Currency Press Study Guide 1 DAVID WILLIAMSON’S DON'S PARTY 1 by John McCallum day be forgotten. More importantly the social has called the ‘awful Australian uniqueness’. behaviour as presented in the play may be He is vulgar, selfish, thoughtless, cowardly and changing. Are Australian parties still like that? disruptive, and yet he is so cheerfully self- Is the rather frantic preoccupation with getting sufficient that audiences always seem to like drunk and cracking-on still an accurate reflection him. Perhaps that is a comment on them (and on of Australian social life? In this age of general Williamson’s supposedly ‘objective’ portrayal of disillusion do the small disappointments in Don’s him) as much as on Cooley himself. Party still seem important? These are interesting One of the great comic devices in Don’s questions for discussion. Party is the way that each character has such an In any case there are other concerns in the appropriate set of social positions or attributes. play which may give it a more universal appeal. Their jobs, for example, seem just right for their The characters are more than just political and characters. Don is a schoolteacher (with a hobby social types. They represent different general of growing native plants). Mal is a psychologist, human traits, and their personal concerns and but in ‘management consultancy’, not private problems—how to cope with disappointment, practice. (To impress Kerry he later says he is in how to get on with each other, how to find ‘executive selection’.) The humourless, pompous enduring satisfaction—are common in societies Liberal voter, Simon, is an accountant for a firm everywhere. This raises a second important aspect that makes ‘plastic extrusions and polystyrene of the play. slabs’. Evan is a dentist (another serious, dull occupation it seems). His hobby is renovating. The play as a human Mack is a design engineer whose hobby is taking document pornographic photos of his wife. (One wonders In this, as in other plays, David Williamson is what he designs.) Kerry is an artist, whose interested in the way people struggle and hobby seems to be her lover, Cam, who creates conflict in group situations. The characters in ‘environments’. Susan is a student and part-time Don’s Party represent a wide range of ways of dancer (stripper, Cooley says). Jenny, Kath and coping with social life. Don, the schoolteacher Jody are mothers and housewives. and failed novelist, copes by a mixture of relaxed The pornographic objects the guests bring are detachment and debunking humour. He is not also appropriate. Mal brings a cartoon pinched even seriously put out when Cooley attacks the from Playboy, Simon a ‘vaguely phallic’ balsa very basis of his failure: his inability just to start model, Mack, a nude photo of his estranged writing, let alone write, the Great Australian wife and Evan, an abstract print which has no Novel. Mal, the great ‘politician’ who in his own pretension to being pornographic but is good art. life has compromised all his political ideals, copes Cooley, of course, brings Susan. through child-like aggression. Each time he is Details such as this enable Williamson to rejected he comes back to start a fight with some create a rich and complex social world in which new hapless victim. Mack, who has just been his characters are firmly set. They also indicate deserted by his wife (but who claims he left her) that the apparently loose, rambling progress of copes by means of an engaging openness about the play is in fact a carefully worked out study of his pathetic inadequacy. human beings in their social context. MACK: Am I a real kink? The characters of the women in Don’s Party COOLEY: Bloody oath. have been condemned by some critics as being MACK: Why do you think I did it? shallow and insufficiently ‘human’. Williamson COOLEY: Because you’re a kink. (p. 62) has defended them on the grounds that in 1969 Cooley is an original larrikin, with a lawyer’s Australian women were in a powerless position, income to support the habit. Of all the characters dependent on their men, and therefore the in the play he is the one who appears to cope best, portrayals are accurate. Certainly the women and he is certainly one of the funniest characters come into their own at the end, when the in the play—yet he also embodies many of men have declined into drunken stupors. The the less endearing aspects of what Williamson scene where Jenny tells Don of her feelings of

 Currency Press Study Guide 1 DAVID WILLIAMSON’S DON'S PARTY 1 by John McCallum frustration and despair reveals a lot about her, the bedroom, embarrassingly interrupted). The and, at least as played by Pat Bishop in the film of carefully prepared food for the party is thrown the play, is one of the scenes which many people on the floor, or disparaged. We never even hear remember as the most moving. the punch-line to the promising duck-hunting The question of sympathy for the characters joke. The mood of the play is encapsulated in the is another important issue in the study of Don’s neat little image which rounds it off. Don starts Party. By many standards the characters in the to light a cigarette, pauses to ponder (over the play are an extremely unattractive lot, and yet events of the evening, or over the events of his they seem to be treated very affectionately. life?) and the match burns his fingers. The play partly satirises their foibles and partly All this could he material for a very gloomy play celebrates their liveliness and humanity. The indeed, and many people do find it depressing. The answer to this apparent contradiction may lie gloom is relieved, however, by the sympathy for in an age-old theory that all is based on the characters in their disillusionment, and, above pain. If the person slipping on the banana skin all, by the humour. is an intimate friend you don’t laugh, you rush In the theatre Don’s Party is one of the funniest sympathetically to help them. Laughter comes Australian plays ever. A lot of the comedy is when you feel in some way distant from or clear in reading it: the gags (‘What’s he got that superior to the misfortune—but the greater the I haven’t got?’ ‘The nod.’) and the comic set- original misfortune, the greater the comedy. One pieces such as the duck-hunting story (p. 19) fine achievement ofDon’s Party is to enable us to or the farcical bedroom scenes. A lot of the feel emotionally involved and comically distant by humour, however, is based on character. Each of turns. Thus, to quote H.G. Kippax again: ‘You laugh the characters is given some comic obsession because the alternative would be embarrassing in or foible which gives the a great deal with a public place’. which to build a rich comic performance. There is Jody’s disarming frankness, Mal’s obsession with The play as a play cracking-on, Mack’s obsession with his kinkiness, How does David Williamson achieve this subtle Simon’s simple desire to spend the evening alternation between humour and sympathy? discussing Buñuel films and Kerry’s preoccupation How does he give to such a carefully arranged with ‘meaningful’, ‘organic’ relationships. The selection of details the appearance of a loose, most obvious example, of course, is Cooley, whose chaotic party? The play is carefully structured and open, single-minded obsession with what might contrived to give the appearance of something be called life’s fundamentals (imbibing, excreting uncontrived and natural. It has no plot, in the and fornicating) is the source of a great deal of sense of a developing story with a beginning, the play’s fun. an increasingly exciting or intriguing middle, All of these comic obsessions are very real developing to a climax and denouément. Rather, to the characters concerned, and very serious. it has an emotional pattern which governs the Different people reading or seeing the play will action. find them funny in different degrees—according That pattern is one of raised expectations to the extent to which they identify with the and hopes and subsequent disillusionment. characters and the extent to which they feel This is obviously the broad pattern of the play distant and objective. It is possible to imagine two as a whole—with the hopes for a Labor victory very different productions: one which played the dashed when the DLP preferences start to come action purely for laughs and one which lingered in. It is the pattern of the lives revealed of the over the more poignant moments where the characters—with their ambitious hopes for emotions are on the surface. Probably the most or professional satisfaction turning satisfying production would be one in which sour as they settle into drab suburban lives. these two elements in the play were kept in The pattern is also repeated in little incidents balance—allowing us to laugh and cry at the same throughout the play. The attempted seductions time. are all thwarted (or, when they get as far as

 Currency Press Study Guide 1 DAVID WILLIAMSON’S DON'S PARTY 1 by John McCallum

Don’s Party probably did more than any other The weakness of the play (two hours play to establish the New Wave of Australian without an interval) is partly that it lacks a real drama of the early 1970s (except perhaps for climax, and partly that it stops short at the another Williamson play, ). The point of demonstration. This is slice-of-life extracts from the press reviews, in the next drama; what is missing is an overall vision of the characters portrayed. section, illustrate its successful stage history. They are neither comic nor tragic, though It began as a little, experimental production at they have possibilities for being both. Nor ’s Pram Factory theatre in 1971. It are they conceived in the spirit of satire. went to another little theatre in in 1972, Williamson is content to depict them the Jane Street Theatre; transferred in the same naturalistically, and to skirt the deeper issues production to the larger Parade Theatre and then that their behaviour raises. to a commercial venue and an extensive tour (including a tour of the Sydney production in 1973 H.G. Kippax on the Jane Street back to Melbourne where it all began). In 1975 it Theatre production, Sydney, Sydney opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Morning Herald, 1 July 1972 The reviews illustrate how, in spite of the On the strength of Don’s Party... first staged general enthusiasm for the play, the critics were in Melbourne, and rewritten for Jane Street, I divided about it. The fact that they disagree about have no doubt that Mr Williamson is the best its vulgarity—some finding it exhilarating and playwright working in Australia, and one of the others finding it objectionable—may simply be best in the world... a sign of their personal moral attitudes. But their First, a warning—and I mean this. This is NOT for the squeamish... It has, continuously, disagreement about the author’s compassion more four-letter words, etc. than any play I for his characters, or lack of it, may indicate know. It has long, very explicit passages of something deeper about the play itself. In any talk about sex, sexual organs, perversion, case Don’s Party will certainly become one of excretion—and politics. (The DLP will hate it.) the classics of Australian comedy, and a source In my opinion (and I don’t like dirt as a rule) of great pleasure to audiences and to all who its dirt is entirely defensible. It is, so to speak, study it. real dirt, fresh from the last drunken rort in the patio culture. Few people, even the would-be intellectuals like Mr Williamson’s gaggle... can 2. The critics’ views dish it out with the sustained virtuosity of this play. And few parties get quite as rough as Leonard Radic on the premiere Don’s. production by the Australian But there isn’t a line, and not a character, Performing Group at the Pram that hasn’t the ring—just off-key—of one part Factory, Melbourne, The Age, of Australia, larger than life. 16 August 1971 The dirt is defensible, in the second Williamson’s interest is in middle-class mores place, because it is Mr Williamson’s running and values. Specifically he is interested in the metaphor for violence—not the overt educated members of that class—not those physical violence of The Removalists but the fresh out of university but some ten years inner festering violence of failed, frustrated, after, when their ideals, like their marriages, unhappy people. It is defensible, finally, because have begun to crumble, when boredom has set it is very, very funny. in and all are looking for ways to renew their flagging zest... on the Jane The party begins quietly, as such parties Street production, The Australian, do, with exchanges of niceties, anecdotes and 6 July 1972 jokes. But as the wine and beer flow, the pace Unlike most of his contemporaries [Williamson] quickens and the characters begin to reveal is not a satirist but writes with an almost themselves along with their hang-ups and unshockable compassion. This motley group repressions... of people at the watershed of middle-age

 Currency Press Study Guide 1 DAVID WILLIAMSON’S DON'S PARTY 1 by John McCallum have an inevitability and, not a defeat but a I don’t think Williamson has any special reconciliation to age which the older cast at compassion about it all. Here they are, Jane Street understands. The voting counts, objective specimens of this current Australian which crackle from the television throughout society. Society is his target. He is saying— the evening, capture in a single image the underneath all the gigantic laughter at his author’s compassionate view of these friends: players’ strip-show—what an extraordinary he shares with them their hopes, their fiery new world this is that has such people in it. facade, their faded radicalism. None of us can alter the passage of time and we all know that Julitha Dent on the Jane Street the Labor Party did not win the 1969 election. production, The Review, 15–21 July Nothing really happens at Don’s party. On 1972 the surface it is a party like any other. In fact Don’s juice-freak wife-swapping party is one the action is full of shocks; the comedy is a gag of those sham celebrations that you may not a line. have been lucky enough to avoid five years ago, But the sheer joy of the play lies in the running the full gamut of social stereotypes, people themselves: familiar, funny and real. pseudointellectual, nymphomaniac Lonely Heart Club Band little liberals and the like—the Kevon Kemp on the Jane Street new breed of university-educated Alfs, for the production, National Times, taste of whom this play might well have been 10–15 July 1972 written. On almost every level of theatre Don’s Party That bourgeois life has been reduced to an is superbly effective. It is bold in form, for it increasing obsession with the urbane and banal forgoes almost any formal structure at all, is no justification for dragging theatre down beyond basic unity of time and place. The play with it. Blurted images of people bound in simply organises itself around the actions of fragmented linguistic and social patterns have its characters. become the accepted modern dramatic idiom... Don’s Party is, in origin, one of the author’s We cannot possibly deceive ourselves own parties... and the neatly selective cast that because we are now producing material comprises a bunch of left-wing, successful acceptable to the Royal Court, that Australian graduates with a respectable accountant and drama has arrived, or as Kippax (SMH) asserts, wife thrown in for kicks, as it were. ‘we have an Australian drama, and it’s doing Remorselessly and brilliantly the play lifts very nicely thank you’ with inflections up all those ticky-tacky houses on the hillside of provincial pride; and further, that Mr that these people have pulled over themselves. Williamson ‘is one of the best [playwrights] The superior pond life thus exposed is paraded in the world’—of this already dead but in front of us with enormously rich and unfortunately not yet forgotten genre… Rabelaisian comic flair... This particular play was approached in the On stage any amount of coarseness can well-tried traditional manner, nothing about it be justified; whereas vulgarity—actions spectacularly good or bad: just enough generic and words out of tune with the situation or candour to leave one cold. character, and inserted only for shock—is While some waste their time arguing the right out of court. Williamson’s play is filled defensibility of its dirt, must we be content with honest coarseness. The characters have to be subjected to this continual rehashing of just their right coarseness. Their vocabulary idioms of the Fifties instead of trying to raise thus flows inevitably, and with its own strange drama out of this rut of irrelevance, so that one beauty of diction... can go to a play without coming away totally All of them talk, many of them with great unmoved, muttering ‘not again, not again!’. openness and honesty, and in their talking the We could all go to a better (or worse) party playwright shows us a marvellously releasing any night of the week. If we could be bothered. vision of what we and such people are. If any pity is established, it is by these humans themselves, their touching humanity, their liability to sustain hurt.

 Currency Press Study Guide 1 DAVID WILLIAMSON’S DON'S PARTY 1 by John McCallum

Brian Hoad on the transfer from Jane sadder than a great tragedy, because it seems Street to the Old Tote Company’s to suggest that Australians deny themselves Parade Theatre, Sydney, Bulletin, real feeling and experience in life—they just 30 September 1972 take it as it comes and ‘give it a go’. But with David Williamson’s Don’s Party the David Thorpe in Melbourne on cruelties of the overexuberant beginnings the national tour of the Sydney [of Australian drama in the late Sixties] are production, Nation Review, passing. The basic ingredients are the same. 11–17 May 1973 All the flaws of Australian life are present Behind its magnificent bawdiness and gross and correct. Yet they are viewed through the humors, its earthy language and drunken cool, clear, quizzical eyes of a born humorist sexuality, Don’s Party is a serious study of who is too intrigued with life as it is to want suburban Australia. It concerns the eroded and to change it. So out goes the bitterness, the tarnished idealism of left-wing intellectuals didacticism, the cynicism and the pretence, caught in the mesh of a materialist society. It and in comes the warmth of humanity... is a study of failure. Its poignancy stems from In many ways it is the world of Chekhov—a the desperate attempts of the characters play about states of mind, about the moods to maintain a pose of progressiveness in beneath the words. The eleven characters a framework of mateship against all the have more or less equal parts to play, more or overwhelming trivia of middle-class suburban less equal claims on the audience’s attention; life—children, school bills, mortgages... the lot. it is the complex interaction of the many voices which creates the play, which is a play Ken Healey, Canberra Times, not about action but about the emotional 23 August 1973 accompaniment to action. Last night in the Canberra Theatre on its return Like Chekhov it makes no demands on to Canberra Don’s Party demonstrated that you. It is offering no particular line in moral high comedy and great tragedy share a basic or human values. You can take it lightly and element: the failure to realise in achievement superficially if you like... ; or you can enjoy it as some of our basic needs. a moody drama of inaction... ; or you can see it David Williamson builds good comedy as the purest form of comedy—that which lies on the basis of an infallible ear for the Oz on the other side of tragedy. Whichever way vernacular, and creates superb theatre by you look at it, it cannot fail to warm the heart. orchestrating his dialogue from elements Don’s Party is rooted in parochialism that trip from the tongues of likeable fits and (as Chekhov was), but because it is dealing misfits. with people beneath the skin it is filled with Tragic heroes are not a likeable lot. One more universal insights (as Chekhov again). may shrink from Lear, feel humbly wretched at Perhaps, too, the same sort of insights; perhaps the sight of Oedipus, even become protective something in common between two societies toward . But in the company of apparently so separated in space and time. Kath, Mal, Mack, Jenny and the rest of Don’s guests, one’s reaction is what would be called Margaret Smith on the Parade compassion if it were possible to remain Theatre season, Nation Review, objective enough to use such dispassionate 11–17 November 1972 language... Without pretending to advance our Don’s Party seems to be demythologising our understanding of Man or Humanity, spelt with society of any sense of greatness. The social capital letters, Don’s Party holds up a wickedly criticism of the play presents a mainstream articulate mirror against the flight of enamel society that is particularly mediocre. People geese on the wall of an Australian house. At a have their ups and downs and have the ability second glance it is not recognisably my own to be resilient. According to this critique house, nor exactly yours. But I have seen most Australians do not have their great heights of of those people at your parties. I distinctly joys and their great tragedies. They just flow disliked most of them then. At Don’s party along oscillating between ups and downs in a I recognised warmth and resilience in them great stream of mediocrity. But perhaps this is which I had never noticed before.

 Currency Press Study Guide 1 DAVID WILLIAMSON’S DON'S PARTY 1 by John McCallum

Malcolm Pettigrove on the Old Tote’s like this? Mr Williamson offers us no reason second company tour, Canberra on earth for a bunch of tolerably prosperous, Times, 30 August 1974 tolerably well-educated young people to act like savages. There is an undeniable Australianness about Don’s Party. It is set in a Melbourne suburb [B.A. Young also said that the play was yet on the night of the 1969 Federal elections. another demonstration that Australia need The election is the nominal pretext for the take no further steps to reduce immigration, party. Beer is the party’s medium. Ego-tripping since no decent person could possibly want to is the party’s principal game. Indifference live there.] to politics is the party’s basic truth. The situation is a familiar one, and as a launching John Elsom, The Listener (London), pad for all kinds of social, psychological or 13 March 1975 political investigations it could hardly be more As the results drool in, the party turns cold. The promising. Unfortunately its possibilities women chat about the sexual performances are never realised. Ignition point is reached of the men with loveless accuracy. The men, between some of the characters, but nothing huddled by the bar, praise and punch each of significance ever takes off. other. Simply as a technical feat, Don’s Party How can it? The language and lifestyle of is an exceptional play. It is very funny as a the characters at the party is too severely and farce, with crisp dialogue, precise timing, depressingly limited, and their concern is only clear but not grotesque characterisation, and for themselves. that neat dovetailing of themes which looks Most of us have met a Mack and a Cooley, casual but requires great craftsmanship. The and have shared such exchanges as: jokes also fulfil two of the criteria described by COOLEY: Shitting, shagging, shaving. Same old Trevor Griffiths in Comedians, of illuminating routine. social behaviour and prompting the desire for MACK: Life gets a bit monotonous, doesn’t it? change. The climax of the play is not of a type associated with farce. The women just sit in But most of us have met a far wider range of an icy circle, watching their two aging campus intellects and imaginations than Mack and heroes, Don and Mal, drunk and sparring, Cooley represent. Even at the same party. matey and brutal, rough-and-tumbling in Unfortunately we seldom move beyond Mack sad adult puppydom. This scene belongs to and Cooley’s circle while we are in Williamson’s moral comedy, deeply felt and accurate. The company. pulpy flesh of polite habits has been chewed At times, Williamson records their language away, until we are left with some brown and and life style so faithfully that it is difficult fly-blown cores. The Australian setting takes to tell whether he is writing a satire or a some pain away for British audiences, but celebration of it. If his purpose is objectively the suspicion remains that these cores, if to depict it, without criticism or praise, the bandaged by different accents, might emerge occasional hints of satire and celebration as one’s best friends even (a horrible thought) make it difficult to tell whether or not he has oneself. succeeded.

B.A. Young on the Royal Court Theatre production, directed by 3. Questions for Michael Blakemore, Financial Times discussion (London), 6 March 1975 1. Williamson has said: ‘There is an awful No doubt Mr Williamson is exposing the Australian uniqueness, and for the first time weakness of contemporary Australian the Australian theatre is getting down to society... but it is not enough, surely, to train the business of finding out what it is’. Does a searchlight on it without some further Don’s Party find out what it is? What is it? dramatic purpose. Are the characters representative of the Should we not be given some idea why whole Australia, or only a limited part of our Australian middle-class society has turned out society?

 Currency Press Study Guide 1 DAVID WILLIAMSON’S DON'S PARTY 1 by John McCallum

2. Take one or more of the characters and try to find evidence in the play that shows their inner human sensitivity or suffering. Obviously it is there in Jenny, because she breaks down, but what about, for example, / Kerry? Or Cooley? / The Jack Manning Trilogy (, 3. Do the male characters get more sympathetic and ) treatment than the female ones? 4. How does the opening conversation, between Don and Kath, anticipate the later gloomy The Removalists degeneration of the party? 5. ‘Subtext’ is the word given in the theatre to what the characters really mean when they Third World Blues say something. For example, ‘Hello!’ can mean ‘I’m really glad to see you’ or ‘Oh no, not you / again’ or any number of other things. Show how the characters use sociable remarks to General Fitzpatrick, Peter, After ‘The Doll’: Australian Drama convey a hidden meaning in, for example, the Since 1955. Melbourne, Edward Arnold, 1979 scene between Evan, Mal, Mack and Don on page 24. Why does Evan leave? Holloway, Peter (ed.), Contemporary Australian Drama: Perspectives Since 1955. Sydney: 6. What does Don’s Party show us about Currency Press, 198 1. (This book is a useful ‘mateship’ between Australian men? What general sourcebook for Australian drama. It does it show us about the relationships also has articles by Roslyn Arnold, Katharine between the women, in comparison? Brisbane, Brian Kiernan, Margaret Williams 7. Discuss the different images of marriage and David Williamson himself which have in the play. Refer also to the relationship things to say about Don’s Party.) between Cooley and Susan, the only Palmer, Jennifer (ed.), Contemporary Australian unmarried couple. Is the play anti-marriage? Playwrights, Adelaide, A.U.U.P., 1979. (See 8. Is Don’s Party an objective study of society? particularly the interviews with David Discuss whether it appears to approve or Williamson and Katharine Brisbane.) disapprove of the antics of its characters. Brisbane, Katharine, New Currents in Australian Discuss different production possibilities Writing, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1978 which might make an audience approve or Dutton, Geoffrey (ed.), The Literature of disapprove of them. Australia, Penguin, Melbourne, revised ed. 1976. (See particularly Part 1, ‘Australian 4. Further reading Drama’ by Katharine Brisbane.) Other published plays by Rees, Leslie, A History of Australian Drama, Volume David Williamson II, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1978 Sturm, Terry, ‘Drama’ in The Oxford History All published by Currency Press, Sydney of , (Leonie Kramer ed.), Melbourne, O.U.P., 1981 Williams, Margaret, Drama in Australian Writers / and their Work Series, Melbourne, O.U.P., 1977 See also: ‘Interview with David Williamson’, Meanjin 2/1979, Don’s Party: From Play to Collected Plays Volume II (The Department, A Handful Film’, Theatre Australia, Vol. I, no. 5 (Christmas, of Friends, The Club and ) 1976)