I wonder why oz theatre icon David Williamson reacted with complacent high dudgeon to a bitchy review on Crikey of his latest turgid thespian offering Don Parties On?  After all, the Murdoch and Fairfax reviews were almost as negative, and redoubtable blogging theatre critic Alison Croggon posted a splenetic masterpiece.  Croggon is married to someone with a real claim to be Australia’s leading contemporary playwright in Daniel Keene, so you’d imagine her undisguised contempt for Williamson’s writing would sting rather more than the somewhat amateurish scribblings of some callow youth on Crikey.  Here’s an extract from Alison’s review:

In Don Parties On, all his writerly clumsiness is writ large – the dire expository dialogue, the stereotypical characters, the almost neurotic repetitiveness, the constant machinations of getting people on and off stage. Much of the dialogue – the pronouncements on baby boomers, greenies, Australian politics and so on – in fact sounds as if it’s been cribbed from some of Australia’s more active political blogs. The people-moving is about as clunkily done as I’ve seen – characters are constantly announcing that now they must go into the garden to show each other photographs of their children, or to the bedroom to check on someone hysterical, or to the study to watch a DVD, so that two or three people can be left on stage to reminisce or reveal something shocking. Alternatively, you get rows of frozen actors standing on stage watching as two or three others do their dialogue.

Robyn Nevin’s direction makes as decent a fist as is possible of this stylistic rubble – I left feeling that it could have been a lot worse. The actors fail to make the characters credible, but it’s hard to blame them given that they are all written as walking cliches; although Sue Jones gives some feisty life to the character of Jenny. But for me, there was no escaping the creeping numbness as the evening wore on.

Naturalism this certainly isn’t. Considered as a comedy of manners, it lacks the grace, wit and formal mastery that gives the form its champagne fizz. A direct comparison with Don’s Party starkly demonstrates how stale Williamson has become: the lively colloquialism of the original, its chief virtue, has long leached out. This really is zombie theatre, devouring the brains, not only of its audience, but of its own playwright.

David, Cate and Andrew in happier (very recent) times – from SMH

It’s always sad when heroic high achievers begin to lose their powers, still more when they fail to age gracefully and succumb instead to bitterness and envy. But so it seems to be with David Williamson, once said to be Australia’s greatest playwright.

On the same day the Sydney Theatre Company’s season of new wunderkind Andrew (Lantana) Bovell’s blockbuster When The Rain Stops Falling opened at the Opera House to rave reviews, Williamson was bitching in the SMH about the poor judgment of the STC under the tutelage of Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton in preferring “dazzle theatre” and “capital-T theatre” over the sort of “storytelling theatre” of which Williamson sees himself as the epitome.

Although the STC has just finished a revival run of his vintage play The Removalists, it appears Cate and Andrew were less interested in staging Williamson’s newer works penned since he revoked a previous 2005 decision to retire from the playwrighting caper.   As a result, Williamson has taken his theatrical bat and gone home via Kirribilli’s Ensemble Theatre, which is about to stage his new work Let the Sunshine (why all these weather metaphors? – it must be the zeitgeist).  The plot summary tells you all you need to know about why Cate and Andrew didn’t want it for the STC:

Let The Sunshine, starring William Zappa, Georgie Parker, Andrew McFarlane and Kate Raison, is a comedy about two ideologically opposed couples living in Noosa, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, who are forced to get on when their children marry and have a child.

“It is a rerun of Romeo And Juliet,” Williamson says. “It’s the Capulets and the Montagues but my star-cross’d lovers don’t come to an horrendous end. Comedy is based not on life-shattering events but ordinary people muddling through their problems.”

Sounds more like an attempt to recycle Travelling North by making the protagonists sea-changing Babyboomers instead of old codgers while grafting a confected ideological conflict onto an already tired concept. 

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