Friday March 29, 2024
David Williamson - behind the scenes
Review

David Williamson - behind the scenes

April 4 2009

David Williamson – Behind the Scenes, by Kristin Williamson, Penguin-Viking, hb $49.95

If the Williamsons are right – and they have nearly four decades of shared experience to draw upon – this book will be lapped up by and please the majority of Williamson D’s legions of fans. At the same time it’s likely that some critics will be dissatisfied with Williamson K because the book isn’t what they think it should be.

This tension between the popular (public) and critical (professional) response recurs frequently in Behind the Scenes. And while that divide is almost a universal given in western culture, it does seem to pertain particularly to the work of Australia’s tallest and most successful playwright.

So, what is the book? And what is it not? Behind the Scenes is a well-written, entertaining, frequently insightful and remarkably honest telling of the ordinary-extraordinary life of David Williamson, the playwright who was at the centre of contemporary Australian theatre’s explosive birth in 1970s Melbourne and Sydney and, more than 30 years later, is still Australia’s most popular writer for the stage. So, curtain up.

The book has been coming for a while: it was first rumoured then confirmed at least a couple of years ago. The news was greeted with a variety of pursed lips and raised eyebrows. As in – “Excuse me? the devoted wife of 30-something years writing her famously thin-skinned husband’s obviously authorised biography! Hello?” It seemed likely to raise hagiography to new heights – or depths, depending on your point of view.

Well, as any halfway decent critic should remind him or herself every day: do not pre-judge; and make every effort to approach everything with an open mind. So this is what Behind the Scenes is, rather than is not. First of all, it’s a page-turner. The author was an accomplished and dedicated journalist (National Times mainly) and has not lost her nose and eye for a good angle, a telling detail and how to cut to the heart of the matter. Nor has she forgotten how to tell a story, sparely, without sentiment and effectively.

Second of all, Williamson K has some fascinating material to work with and in her matter-of-fact style makes the most of it. Williamson D came from the deceptively ordinary beginnings of a nicely brought up suburban Australia that snoozed in the sun. It was lulled by the Menziean bromide of political and social certainties – God, the Queen (not necessarily in that order) and a profession. Young David rebelled early – and quite shockingly – as a shy, overly tall schoolboy when he noisily disrupted an especially boring school event. And, in his own well-mannered way, he’s been disrupting polite society ever since.

The Williamson household was typical of the 1950s: an increasingly dissatisfied, socially ambitious mother; a dutifully providing but creatively frustrated father and two boys who did their best to be appropriate sons. For Elvie Williamson, a good life meant her husband’s steady and respectable employment at the bank and the greater necessity of her two sons attending university and becoming – preferably – a doctor or lawyer. Despite early and powerful creative ambitions, the young David did his best to fit in, although his engineering degree not only disappointed Elvie but propelled him into an occupation he loathed. Just like his father.

The engineer-turned university lecturer, with a beard to make him look more mature, also fulfilled his mother’s dreams of an early marriage to a nice young woman, with offspring and a pleasant home in suburban Melbourne. But the engineer still harboured dark urges and at night he slipped out of his greasy overalls (please allow a little licence here) and became a denizen of louche, decadent places such as Carlton and its immoral epicentre, La Mama.

When still at university David had contributed sketches and other material to student revues and, surprise surprise, they were generally the sharpest and funniest elements of these otherwise forgettable entertainments. And all the while Elvie disapproved, pursed her lips and generally adopted the martyred air of disappointed mothers everywhere. In this she inadvertently supplied her son with sufficient material for a lifetime of thwarted, socially ambitious mother characters. Inadvertently too, everyone and everything around him did the same.

One of the aspects of the playwright that Kristen explores and reveals is his virtually sociopathic tendency towards his friends and loved ones. It’s a (cliched) given that writers and playwrights mercilessly use those in the immediate vicinity as primary source material, but rarely has it been so vividly and continuously documented.

In 1967 Gough Whitlam became leader of the ALP and the ground at last seemed to be shifting. The young were desperate for change and were also awake to a yearning for cultural nourishment that was theirs and not imported from England. Unlike the Menzies generation, not only did they not see Her passing by and therefore love her ’til they die, they actually didn’t give a shit. They wanted to hear Australian voices expressing Australian concerns. Not for them the mellifluous tones of the West End. Or Broadway.

David Williamson - behind the scenes

As well as being a fervent supporter of Whitlam,David Williamson, in the early 70s, was both the irresistible force and immovable object – a massive untapped talent that was in the right place at the right time. Not that it was that easy for him. For the umpteenth time in his life he found that he didn’t really fit in and was regarded with suspicion by those who did. He was too suburban for the self-appointed guardians of the working class – the middle class Carlton groovies – and, increasingly was a bit nerve-racking for the those who preferred genteel respectability.

Life in general was nerve-racking for David at that time. At 29 his marriage was atrophying; his head was full of Don’s Party and The Removalists and he experienced for the first time the high drama and sickening tension of fully fledged productions of both plays. He then had to get his head around partial repudiation in his home town followed by the amazing and life-changing career boost of being championed by John Bell, not long returned from Stratford and one of the founders of Nimrod in Sydney. There followed public adulation, box offices going flat out ker-ching, the near disaster of being threatened by the censors with closure and worse (not for the “f” word but because a central theme of The Removalists is a corrupt policeman!) and, most significantly of all – for his future personal and working life – he had met and fallen for Kristin.

Anyone who read the tantalising excerpt in the Weekend Australian magazine a couple of weeks ago will already have an idea of how frank and unsensational the author of the book has been about her marriage to and life with the playwright. The style she has adopted is an object lesson in how to achieve all the page-turning, un-put-downable attributes of a pot-boiler without the downside of that genre. Essentially, in resolutely writing in a dispassionately cool (journalistic) way about the lows and highs of their early years together, the difficulties of doing the 70s “open marriage” thing, the pain and humiliation of coping with his major – almost marriage-ending – affair; the head- and heartache of raising a brood of children long before the “blended family” was the norm, are variously touching, funny and absorbing in the telling. She spares neither herself nor her husband, but neither does she wallow nor go anywhere near bathos nor the nauseating fad for TV confessional/gut-spilling. And the book is all the stronger for that.

At the same time, because she was first an actress, then a journalist, Kristin is really good on the play writing life. She understands what it is he does, she has observed it and aided it intimately over the decades and is able to write lucidly and knowledgeably about the process. It’s doubtful that the playwright himself could have illuminated his working methods and ideas as well, while a writer further removed from his life and work would have little chance of integrating the two as fluently. There’s room for scholarly approaches to the Williamson oeuvre – but this book will be an important source for such an approach, rather than a stumbling block of “been there, done that”.

It’s to the credit of both Williamsons that Behind the Scenes is so candid, and not only in personal matters. Kristin even finally makes sense at last, for the still bemused, of the dog’s breakfast that was Dogs Head Bay; and is insightful about the playwright’s notoriously antagonistic relationship with theatre critics – and his surprisingly punchy response to a number of people.

Kristin is no shrinking violet herself, however, and there are some delicious moments of artless tale-telling (and the misspelling of a frightfully important critic’s name) that will irritate the bejesus out of the affronted and amuse everyone else. While not mean enough to be payback, the author wouldn’t be human if she hadn’t taken the opportunity to pepper the pretentious with a spray of grapeshot. It may sting, but it won’t do real injury.

At the same time, it’s possible she will attract criticism for the unusual way the biographer is integrated into the subject’s story. As the book progresses and the years go by it’s clearly impractical to pretend she is not part of the story and I think it would not have been possible, or truthful, to do otherwise in the circumstances. The result is a uniquely personal yet objective three-dimensional, living, breathing portrait of one of Australia’s most notable artists. It’s also a vibrant social and theatrical history of the past 40 years.

Most significantly, perhaps, is that it explores and eventually clarifies what it is that this playwright does and wants to do, and why that has so often been at odds with what critics have thought he was doing or ought to do. And why, somewhere in the middle is the Williamson audience, the people who – without precedent in play writing history in this country – have eagerly looked forward to whatever it is he’s done and then done next. For the acuity of that analysis alone, the book is worth reading. It’s also an engrossing book for anyone interested in an inside account of how theatre and politics were wrenched from the dead clutches of post-colonial English influence to become what we recognise in modern Australia.

That’s what this book is. It should be a (deserved) bestseller and is probably Kristin Williamson’s best work since her National Times days. As for her husband, a career that began with instant classics such as Don’s Party, The Removalists and The Club was always going to be a killer to maintain. That it has almost killed him from time to time is one of the book’s more unsettling revelations. Happily, however, David Williamson’s retirement is, to date, not unlike that of Dame Nellie Melba. And like her, he’s doing it his own terms. Pretty much as he always has.

 

Subscribe

Get all the content of the week delivered straight to your inbox!

Register to Comment
Reset your Password
Registration Login
Registration