The Department
David Williamson
State Theatre South Australia
The Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Set in 1967, first performed in 1974, David Williamson’s The Department, like other early works such as The Club and Don’s Party , is both generic and prophetic. While bearing some resemblance to Swinburne College of Technology, where Williamson taught in the Engineering faculty in the sixties, The Department is also archetypical of a staff meeting in any educational institution. Or, for that matter, anywhere that two or three are gathered together in the name of a quorum.
Some tropes, though, are eerily predictive of education policies in particular. The decision in the tertiary education sector to transform everything to university status, the systematic rationalisation of teaching resources, the problems for instructors from the old tech studies world in keeping pace with the new order, the emergence of a new generation of academic managers, and the unseemly push for position when the federal funding windfalls began to rain on the just and the unjust – all these are astutely identified in Williamson’s play. You wonder whether, when John Dawkins unleashed his terrible swift sword on tertiary education, it was because he had seen an early production of The Department.
Revived by Rodney Fisher, director of the premiere production by STC twenty four years ago, The Department plays on the verve of its comedy and the effectiveness of its stock figures. Shaun Gurton’s set depicts the mezzanine of a brutalist industrial education building girded by huge intestinal piping, and leading, with heavy-duty fencing and steel stairs, down to an unseen basement from which various voices and other noises-off emanate. Its grey green walls and emphatic no smoking signs are both familiar and a sort of Australian Kafka. The cramped stage space- a little platform with ageing school desks and blackboard- is overwhelmed by heaving mechanical plant. The priorities are signalled well enough.
Into this crucible of procrastination and deadlock come the various characters. Peter, the bright young thing from Sydney Uni, Al, the defender of “standards”, who regularly fails forty percent of his class on sight, John, young earnest and learning the ways of compromise, Bobby, old stalwart no longer cutting the mustard, Hans and Owen, the hacks, and Myra, the alien from Humanities, bringing a shrewd eye and a sense of emancipationist principle.
Presiding over this microcosm are Robby, the endlessly manoeuvring Head of Department and Gordon, the outspoken loose cannon of a caretaker cum laboratory technician, a stock type of the outspoken servant as old as Roman comedy.
Given Williamson’s well-constructed script- which is simply, but adroitly, located in real time in a meeting with a lunch break- the players who succeed best are those who most serve the rhythms of the play. Patrick Frost returning to a work, but not a part, he played in its premiere season, is unsettling as the chipper but incompetent Bobby, a man who knows he’s the walking dead but can’t do a thing about it. Nathan Page and Matthew Whittet are also convincing as two versions of the rising hopeful.
Bronwen James’ Myra is an interesting portrait of the changing role of women in the men’s park of Engineering, Gregory Ulfan struggles with the part of Hans and on my night was barely audible from the back row of the stalls. Geoff Revell is sharp as the type A obsessive Al, and Don Barker, well-used to the cadences of Williamson’s work gives Gordon both an indolence- and when he decides to run the pumps into the flotation tank- a comic sentimentality on which the play pivots.
But the success of The Department rests in the role of Robby. And the making of this production is Paul Blackwell’s reading of him. From his first entrance to the last, Blackwell energises the character with a marvellous mix of exasperation and madcap guile. As his speech to John in Act Two indicates, Robby has a commitment to his work which has cost him friends, family, marriage and remnants of his sanity. But Williamson has also portrayed a devotee to science, for whom the cock-up with the flotation tank- in the one week in years that he went on holiday- is a taunt of world-shattering proportions.
Paul Blackwell, with the full arsenal of his physical comedy- the dancing walk, the almost-palsied head shake, the suction sealed lower lip, the capacity to be hilarious when angry- has made of Robby, not a cold blooded academic operator, but a poor bastard trying to get through the agenda and discovering that, when the place isn’t suffering from paralysis, it has a chronic case of tertiary sisyphus.
The Adelaide Review, April, 1998.