INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION The present study is a modest attempt to explore power politics and interpersonal relationships in the select plays of Australian playwright David Williamson. Power politics influences the human life as it shapes cultures and establishes new social and religious constructs. There are two key words- Power Politics and Interpersonal Relationships, involved in the title which signifies how the power politics influences the human relationships. These are the two sides of the coin. They are very much related to each other in every context. The exploration of human relations in the context of the term power perceives us several important dimensions of the social relations. The social status always relies on the power. Power is a complex social interaction between those who command and those who obey. These discourses, from various disciplines, in common, speak about the role of ‘power’ in the human life. Every human being has the power at his/her level, and with the help of this power he/she dominates others. Power depends upon the relationship between two persons, groups in society. Power politics and changing human relations have remained a matter of concern in ancient and modem academics. The literature cannot be separated from the frame of society and culture; therefore, literature cannot be isolated from the influence of power. This philosophical ideology always reflects in the literary works. The concept of power is much debated in academics and has remained an area of interest for the philosophers. The present research work intends to adopt this perspective of power politics and evaluate its influence over the human relations. The 1 said statement can be illustrated with the analysis of the select plays of David Williamson, renowned, contemporary Australian playwright. Thus, the study needs to place David Williamson in the Australian literary tradition of drama. Review of Australian Drama in Brief: The rise of drama in Australia is generally associated with the establishment of British colonies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the history of Australian literature, first author F.C. Brewer in his book The Drama and The Music New South Wales (1892) surveys the development of Australian drama and rightly points out that the British colonies in Australia formed Australian theatrical arts as an extension to English Literature and to British and Irish theatre traditions. Since, the inception of Australian literature, theatrical artists introduced the culture of Australia to the world stage. In Australia, the idea of theatre performance depends on the self-consciousness of society and theatre. For the convenience of the study of tradition of Australian drama, some historians such as Elizabeth Webby, Terry Sturm, and Leslie Rees give three periodizations of Australian drama. Phase 1:1788-1900 The first phase of Australian drama started in 1788. David Bum migrated from Scotland to Tasmania in 1826, known as the first author of Australian drama. He wrote eight plays over two decades. His first collection of plays published at Hobart in 1842. His famous plays are The Bushrangers (1829) and Sydney Delivered (1845). The play Bushrangers deals with the themes of convictism and bushranging and emphasizes on factional conflict between Tasmanian officialdom and free-settlers. He was also a journalist and polemicist on political, military as well as 2 literary matters. He wrote number of historical works and described characters with three narratives - An Excursion to Port Arthur, Vindication of Van Diemen’s Land and Narrative of an Overland Journey to Macquarie Harbour. The first play of George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer, is another significant play belonging to the first period. It was performed for sixty audiences at Port Jackson, on 4 June 1789, in the presence of Governor Phillip and the officers of the garrison. Most of the early plays are modeled on the popular English plays, for instance - H. C. O. Flaherty’s Life in Sydney or The Ran Dan Club (1843) was modeled on the popular English play Tom and Jerry or Life in London. James Tucker’s Jemmy Green in Australia written at Port Macquarie in 1845 was modeled on the same English play. During 1830s and 1840s, the local songs, ballads, recitations, comic satires were included in the performances. Edward Geoghegan was a significant Australian dramatist of this period. He was a convict, so his plays were submitted to the public either anonymously or under the names of the actors or managers. He wrote nine plays and performed at the Royal Victoria in the 1840s. His famous play, The Currency Lass, presents the story of a native girl who is very talented and makes arrangements for a marriage very skillfully. After the 1840s, in a true sense, Australian drama begins with the performance of Bum’s plays - Negro Vengeance and A Tale of the Barbados. In the later 1840s and early 1850s Francis Belfield, a Melbourne actor wrote three plays viz. Retribution or The Drunkard’s 3 Curse, Rebel Chief and Zisca the Avenger. They were performed by Queen’s Theatre Company. Pantomime, a popular Victorian form as it deals with local or topical allusions, allows Australian dramatic tradition to celebrate their culture. Pantomime is a mixture of romance and realism. For example, John Lazar’s Grand Easter Pantomime, which expresses the local scene, background, people, society of Sydney, was performed at the Royal Victoria in Sydney, in 1846 for the first time. Another example, The Christmas Pantomime, was performed at the Royal Victoria in Sydney, in 1844, that presents a new panorama of 253 feet long, a short way of showing the various points of a voyage from Greenwich to New South Wales. One of the major contributing factors in Australian drama was discover of the gold. In the early 1850s, the gold was discovered in New South Wales and Victoria, which gave a new direction to Australian drama. The gold was also discovered in townships like Ballarat, Bendigo and Bathurst as well as the main cities like Melbourne and Sydney. The sudden growth in population affects theatre constructions in the initial stage. As a result, in 1850, two theatres were constructed in Melbourne and Sydney with seating arrangement of three thousand audiences, which were Melbourne’s ‘Royal Theatre’ and Sydney’s ‘Prince of Wales Theatre’ respectively. The overseas touring companies and visiting stars affected on Australia’s prosperity. There were two effects on the Australian dramatic convention. The first was many people of overseas companies and stars came to Australia to judge the competitiveness between managements, 4 and the second result was a positive development in the professional acting and stage direction. Australian and Anglo-Australian melodrama flourished through the works of Alfred Dampier and George Darrell. The themes of Australian melodramas such as convictism, bushranging and gold discovery were the victims of concentration in competing with other drama. The most important writers of 1850s were Garnet Walch, Alfred Dampier, George Darrell, and Walter Cooper. The most prominent dramatist who initiated the tradition of melodrama in Australia was Walter Cooper. His earlier plays - Kodadad and His Brothers, Colonial Experience and A New Crime or Andsome Enerys Mares Nest performed in the late 1860s and include operatic burlesque, a comedy, and a farce, respectively. The play, Colonial Experience, was a Sydney based domestic comedy of intrigue. It is known as the victory of loyalty and goodness of heart over city-bred acquisitiveness. George Darrell was one of the best Anglo-Australian melodramatists of this period. His play, The Sunny South (1883), explores the colonial life, bushranging, goldfield’s excitement, and related themes. It staged fifteen hundred performances in Sydney and Melbourne during 1883 to 1891. The play was also performed in London and America and touring productions in Australia and New Zealand. Another famous playwright of this phase was Alfred Dampier. He was a reputed author, co-author, adaptor, producer and actor of the Australian melodrama. His first successful stage adaptation of His Natural Life in 1886 gave him popularity through a decade. In this period, 5 he produced more than dozen of plays. The later phase included contemporary urban melodramas such as Thomas Somer’s Voice of the Night (1886), Marvellous Melbourne (1889) and The Great City (1891). In this period, there was American influence on Australian melodrama in the plays of Cooper, as well as Darrell, but it was strong in Dampier’s work. In the late 1860s and 1870s, Marcus Clarke was prominent literary figure whose works reveal the difficulties and problems faced by the talented playwrights in the increasing time. He wrote twenty odd plays and fragments. His dramatic writings were the experimentation with the available forms and sense of frustration. The period 1870s to 1890s is known as the golden era of Australian theatre. The period was noted for the rise of local melodrama, it reveals that Australian theatre has its root in pantomime. Pantomime depended for its effect on the liveliness of its local allusions, events, personalities, and a framework of fantasy in which tensions were always happily resolved. The most prolific authors of pantomime were W. M. Akhurst and Garnet Walch in 1850s at Melbourne. The major causes of decline of Australian melodrama were the dominance of large-scale overseas theatrical interest; development of the film industry in early 20th century; and beginning of non-commercial theatre under the guidance of theoretical and practical inspiration of Louis Esson. 6 Phase II: 1900 - 1960 The period during 1900-1960 is considered as a second phase of Australian drama which is popularly known as postcolonial or nationalist period. It has uneven development as it witnesses the rise of new dramatic methods and the beginning of commercial theatre. It was a revolt against the established theatrical practice.