Don's Party
Don's Party, Sydney Theatre Company (with the MTC) at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, September 19-October 27; www.sydneytheatre.com.au
In 1971 the then 29-year-old David Williamson wrote a play while on holiday from his day job as an engineering lecturer at Swinburne. The play was Don's Party and although he was already a bit of a talent around La Mama and the Pram Factory, nobody liked it, nobody wanted it. Its middle class, upwardly mobile characters were seen as too bourgeois, while middle class, upwardly mobile Melbourne Theatre Company was appalled by its raunchy, rough language and ideas.
Rather than retire to a corner and sulk, instead Williamson wrote The Removalists, and everybody liked that. As is so often the case, its runaway success in Melbourne and Sydney forced an instant reappraisal of the earlier work - and the rest is history.
More than 30 years on it is Don's Party that stands the test of time, not least because although the clothes and hair-dos have changed, little else has. The play's targets, humour and concerns remain a combination of pertinent, funny or depressing depending on your position in the social spectrum and your political outlook.
The party is Don's idea: it's election night 1969, Labor is supposed to win and he wants to celebrate the event with his like-minded mates. Don and Kath's home is decorated for the event with bunting and posters depicting the young Gough Whitlam in his greasy bodgie hair phase. There are bowls of Twisties and chips and Kath's triumphant decorative cheese and cocktail onion hedgehog. The fridge is full of beer and the TV, with rabbits' ears akimbo, is pulled into the kitchen the better to watch the unfolding triumph.
The first guests to arrive are Kath's friends, Simon and Jody. She is overdressed, he is an accountant and they are Liberal voters. This revelation stuns the rest of the guests as they arrive in quick succession. The evening can only get worse and it does as alcohol lubricates and loosens tongues and inhibitions.
For those of us who have been silly or optimistic enough to hold election night parties over the past eleven years, Don's Party is gruesomely recognisable and not necessarily funny except in the blackest and bleakest terms! The guests interact, or don't; conversation is desultory, stilted and mostly trivial; alliances and attractions ebb and flow. But this party - Don's party - is a hook on which Williamson characteristically hangs a whole lot more.
In recent years it has become a given, if not exactly fashionable, to deride Williamson's work as if it were some awful, homogenous whole. It is not, of course, although similar themes and preoccupations can be seen: alcohol often plays a significant role in the forward momentum of plots and inevitable disaster - not a surprise given the playwright's interest in chronicling Australia and Australians of the past four decades. He is also fascinated by the power plays and shifting relationships - in business, politics and the bedroom - that dictate so much of what happens between men and women and the classes, in politics, business and the bedroom. All of these are evident in the microcosm of Don and Kath's home and social circle and the play remains engrossing across the passage of time.
Its accuracy - even at this distance - is still spot on, except in one aspect. In the period of the play's real and stage time-line - 1969-1971 - the sexual mores as depicted are now as quaint as Mick Jagger's 1969 white frilly frock outfit. It's not so much that the almost frantic urge of the men to crack on to a woman - any woman - is that different (just think of any Friday night in one of the CBD watering holes of the moment to dispel any doubt) it's more that women have changed and up with it they will not put. At least - neither as much nor as meekly as happens at Don's Party .
All in all, the play has a lot to offer both as comedy and food for thought - even as a measure of how much Australia has and has not changed in the 35 years since it first astonished, appalled and amused theatregoers. It's not likely, for instance, that an accountant would be gainfully employed these days in a manufactory of "plastic extrusions and polystyrene slabs" - unless, of course, he's Chinese. But attitudes are still either disturbingly or poignantly familiar when it comes to friendships, love and marriage.
What is unfortunate about this production - a co-production with Melbourne Theatre Company and staged there at the Playhouse Theatre at the beginning of this year - is that it lets the play down and also puts an intolerable and unfair burden on the actors. The Playhouse stage and that of the Drama Theatre are very different but it is not clear that this has been taken into account. The wide "letterbox" of the Drama Theatre needs special care if actors are not to be forced to lope from side to side with the audience carrying on as if at a tennis match. Often, here, the action is diffused, deflected or becomes unfocused through inadequate choreography of the scenes and movements in different parts of the stage. The timing, pace and rhythms of the dialogue and action are hampered by this clumsy or ill-thought out staging. On opening night, at least, there was an overall feeling of somnolence which prevailed despite the bright firework display of the individual performances.
Rhys Muldoon takes the gift part of the obnoxious charmer Cooley and makes him live; Mandy McElhinney's tight-lipped, tight-arsed yet touching Kath is a delight, as is Alison Whyte's weary, migraine-toting bitch Jenny. Felicity Price inhabits Lib-loving Jody's chiffon with subtlety and relish while Jacinta Stapleton as Cooley's new dollybird girlfriend Kerry, and Caroline Brazier as free-spirit artist Kerry inhabit opposite ends of the Swinging 60s' intellectual spectrum.
With the exception of Muldoon, the women have a better time of it in this production - ironic, given past accusations of misogyny in the depiction of women in the play. It's partly, perhaps, that the strength and depth of the characters was always there and partly that these actors are a consistently excellent group. The men - despite comically grisly 70s gear - are not as sharply defined or, where they are, tend to slip perilously towards caricature. Nevertheless, none of the above shortcomings are able to take away the play's underlying strength or obliterate the excellent performances. These range from hilarious to heartbreaking and that's not simply because of the outcome of the night's election.
Dale Ferguson (aided by lighting designer Matt Scott) obviously had a brilliant time researching and coming up with the 70s suburban home - Danish furniture, textured brick feature wall and all - while the costumes are a triumph of psychedelic fabrics (women) and the full panoply of dreary casual wear (men) that signified the moment when these people were poised on the cusp of conservatism-about-to-go-wild.
Don's Party is a significant and entertaining snapshot of a moment in Australian history that has proved to be both universal and enduring. The playwright's irritating popularity should not be allowed to obscure that.
