Don’s Party
by David Williamson
State Theatre
Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
There can be no better instance of David Williamson’s theatrical verve than Don’s Party. This suburban bacchanal not only captures in broad sweeps the issues of its day it is also a durable comedy of humours. The situation is disarmingly simple. A group of people get together for an election night party which deteriorates into confrontation and regret. It ends not with resolution but exhaustion -with just a touch of catharsis for all concerned. It is a familiar structure. After all it worked well for Eugene O’Neill in Long Day’s Journey into Night, and is not without relevance to Edward Albee’s boozy melodrama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?
But it is the richness of detail which makes Don’s Party so appealing and distinctively Australian. In some ways it is hard to imagine fully the exhilaration that the play must have created when it first played at the Pram Factory in 1971. We are now well used to the comic use of the Australian vernacular in full unexpurgated cry. We have also had twenty five years of home grown bedroom farce – from Alvin Purple to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
Other elements, however, have curved back into our orbit. For many, distinctly uncomfortably. The sense of the Labor party repeatedly consigned to the wilderness was a real grief when the play was first staged. By the time Bruce Beresford’s raucous film version appeared, Gough Whitlam had reached his Time, the DLP was history and Don Henderson and his friends, back in the wilderness years, seemed a touch archaic. Now, to use the Prime Minister’s favourite metaphor, the pendulum has swung back- and quite a few people are getting hit in the chops as a result. When Don and his cobbers spend a dispiriting night watching their political party go down the gurgler, it is a spectacle which has renewed poignancy for many since March of last year.
Director Rosalba Clemente is aware of these cross-currents in her revival for State Theatre’s now defunct Australian Playhouse but she and designer Dean Hills have nonetheless gone for heavy period detail and maximum laughs.
Hills’ production design, with its profusion of oranges and browns, crochet shawls, tan suede, heavy pottery and beanbags, has a studied, if exaggerated, accuracy. But it is for the wrong generation. True, the play is set in 1969 but that doesn’t mean that a bunch of people who started university in 1955 are going to be sitting around dressed like the Bee Gees and listening to Jimi Hendrix – any more than middle class characters in a current Williamson play are likely to be wearing nipple rings and listening to the Foo Fighters or Supergrass.
The point is not trivial. Don and his friends were adolescents in the 1950s. The mid-life crises, gender politics, sexual neuroses and career disappointments that beset them are all part of the upheaval and recriminations of a cohort who are too young for Arthur Calwell and too old for Marcuse, Millett and pop art Maoism.
But Don’s Party doesn’t hinge on fine points of sociology, it was greeted as exuberant comedy when it first performed and it still works for that reason. Williamson’s grotesque portrait of suburban barbeque manners is, among it all, affectionate. Certainly he is slow to chide- or cast the first stone . These people have strong loyalties. They are also capable of baleful treachery. The men are full of boasting, the women retreat into resentment and bitter one-liners. So, despite the surface of fast dialogue and giddy farce Williamson’s play has a melancholy undertow. It is like a Carry on version of Uncle Vanya.
As the feckless host, Greg Stone is excellent as Don. Wistful, gormless and busily planting Australian natives, he is oblivious to the quiet fury of his wife Kath, played with well-sustained edginess by Kate Roberts. As Mal Sutherland, the philosopher turned windbag, Russell Kiefel captures just the right swaggering self promotion, while Eileen Darley, as his wife Jenny, is a suitably uncomfortable mix of disappointment and venom.
Others are more strictly comic types. Arky Michael capers as Mack, the ocker voyeur, Michael Habib is earnestly priggish as Simon and Geoff Revell’s Evan is that ancient archetype, the self-important cuckold. Cooley, the yobbo lawyer, all talk and unzipped libido, is one of David Williamson’s most brazen characters, immortalised by Harold Hopkins in the Beresford film. Brandon Burke plays him like a young Sid James in brown suede, but you sense a hesitation in the performance. In twenty five years even Cooley has been rehabilitated.
As for the women. Cathy Adamek and Eva Hamburg as Susan and Kerry swoop the room, emanating sexual availability, goading the men and unsettling the married women while Bronwen James creates a sharply comic portrait of Jody, the conservative young matron who parties with the wrong party.
State has belatedly opened its season with a lively success, proof that David Williamson is, as ever, a strong drawcard. As with The Club last year his vintage work stands up well. And as with The Club, Rosalba Clemente has gone less for the jugular and more for the funnybone. Of course, Don’s Party is in many ways a straight-forwardly amusing play and not one to be fussed about too much. But it would be a pity if audiences only see it as a nice night’s entertainment from the Olden Days. The play does have things to say- about change and insecurity and pissing away your time. And, unlike body shirts and flares, they aren’t things we can relegate to the silly old seventies.
The Adelaide Review, July, 1997.