cultural_philistine
HAL_9000Review of Don's Party (Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company)
September 26th 2007 03:26
Cultural_philistine watches HAL_9000 give the thumbs up to the STC's latest blockbuster.
So, David fucking Williamson.
You don't like David Williamson?
Some people like him, and some people don't. I guess I'm one of those that don't.
Why?
Well, he earns enough money for me to hate him.
David Williamson is one of the leading social commentators of our time.
If you like your commentary skin deep.
He records Australia as it is and no one else does that as well as he does.
I suppose that's true. But is it entertaining to watch Australia as it is?
He makes Australia accessible to the everyday of the street, his playwrighting is accessible, everybody identifies with it, they understand it.
And they walk out of it a little dumber than they walk in.
What are you saying about the average Australian?
Didn't you think that that was just a glorified sitcom?
Well, to some extent, but it portrayed Australia in the 1970s and I could identify with it down to the orange chair covers and the cane wicker chair. I mean, my parents used to have that, and it was just like a flashback.
I've got to hand it to the guy that it's kind of an artform to balance... however many characters there were... probably about ten characters at once.
Eleven.
Eleven characters.
Weren't you watching?
And there's always an issue whether all of the characters are sufficiently developed, and no they weren't, but that's just because to balance eleven characters you need some degree of stereotyping. And that's forgivable in this sort of medium, because in comedy you always have commedia dell'arte characters, you have these sort of stock characters... You've got a funny expression on your face.
Ohhhh kay.
When you look back, which characters stood out as having distinct characters? And which fade into the mush?
Actually for me they all had distinct characters.
Even the women?
Yeah! Absolutely.
All right, which characters did you like?
Well, I loved lots of them, but, um... particularly liked... what's her name... the Liberal ("Jody", played by Felicity Price)... I mean, that was just hysterical.
It does show that you can't remember their names, even though you remember their characters.
Well, names, who cares, names names, what does that mean.
And you also liked her because you vote Liberal.
It's a secret ballot.
You're the first person I've met who admits to voting Liberal, as the play says. But, okay, the play wasn't really about politics so much, right?
Well, it was set against politics.
It's all about sex really.
It's a mixture. It's about how people... how these people identify, see themselves, and what their aspirations are. And it's about their... the things in their life that they're not happy with, or... And how people on the surface can look as though they're the perfect couple and you scratch the surface and they have all these anxieties and --
And they all want to shag each other.
Well, you have to look at the cause of why they want to do that. It's because they're discontented or they're struggling to... find themselves or be something or go somewhere in their lives, so they think that's going to solve all their problems.
It's allgedly set in 1969.
[Laughs]
I don't know why you're laughing. But is that meant to be a commentary on... I don't know... on the whole sort of spirit of the times or something like that?
I would say it was. Although, I think in the brochure it said that it was supposed to be showing, you know, that Australians were... upwardly mobile astute well-educated people and they were discussing issues that were occurring... To be honest with you, I didn't think the play showed anyone particularly favourably, I mean none of them had any class...
Was it funny?
Yes it is. Funny in more an interesting way.
Not funny in a ha-ha way?
Oh yeah, that too, at times, but more sort of interesting... I mean to be honest with you I think the group of people... the characters they were supposed to be, they were... in many ways more well-educated than the average Australian, so they were showing a group of people there that if they were meant to be the average Australian... Not everybody has gone to university, whereas all of those characters, on the whole they were university-educated, so in that way they're not representative. The ironic thing is that even though they were allegedly better-educated than the average person they still lacked class of any kind.
You didn't think that Cooley (Rhys Muldoon) was rather suave.
Oh, he was revolting. Absolutely revolting.
Did you feel sympathetic towards Don (Steve Le Marquand) and his psychologist mate ("Mal", played by Christopher Pitman) because of their lost ambitions?
I thought they were a bunch of whinging useless males. I mean, really, their wives were the backbone of their lives, and they... they just were boys that had never grown up.
Would you liked to have gone to that party?
Um, no. No, much preferred to have been an observer.
Looked like a fun party to me. So personally I thought that all the actors gave... well I thought very good performances. I don't know whether I'm getting soft in my old age, I've been saying that about a lot of people lately, but I thought they were good performances.
They were. Yeah, they were. They played their characters exactly, to a tee.
And I'm not sure what it is about comic acting. I mean, it's reactive like normal acting but it's also sort of slightly... I don't know... people with funny faces or whatever, and I thought they... whatever comic acting is, they did it well.
I thought first and foremost it was truthful acting, and then the comedy was as a result of them playing the characters truthfully. Because there was quite a serious side to the comedy -- it was, you know, about people's discontent with their lives and their feelings of being trapped in whatever situation they were in at the time.
It was also... when they all get drunk... there's a little bit of over-the-topness, isn't there?
No. No no no, I think when people get drunk they generally are over the top. Actually, one of the themes that come across for me was how restricted people felt by the marriages they were in, and a strong thing for me was how the women felt that the men were trapping them by marriage... And in the party you see the women variously breaking out against whatever bind they feel their husband has over them, they're saying, you know, I'm not your property, I can go to this party, I don't have to go home with you, I decide when I go home, you don't own me --
"You don't own me."
Well, I don't know when that song was around but maybe it's from that era. That sort of came across quite strongly to me, and perhaps when this was written that was quite ground-breaking, I don't know.
In what sense did Don's wife ("Kath", played by Mandy McElhinney) say to her husband "you don't own me"?
I think Don was too childlike to be even slightly... He was probably the least possessive, but then he just expected her to put up with his party and not invite any of her friends, and she says Stuff you, I've invited Jody and Simon, and so that was sort of her act of asserting herself...
Do they love each other?
Yes, but I think there's different layers of... They've obviously been through ups and downs, and I don't think her husband has ever, Don has ever grown up.
What about the managerial consultant, his wife ("Jenny", played by Alison Whyte). How does she tell him to piss off?
Well I think she's what I suppose they call a passive aggressive. I mean all her aggression is directed inward, and she's... well, depressed actually. So instead of being outwardly aggressive, she's more internalized her aggression... And she's basically fed up with being the poor provider and having four kids and not feeling like she's in control of her life or doing what she wants to do, so...
But she seemed to live through her children.
Well, I suppose the question is... I mean ,she can no longer work, so that they're her life, she's so busy looking after them that she doesn't have time to do anything else or to think about herself and they don't have the money for her to do that, so she feels trapped by her social circumstances.
What about the males, what do they want?
Well, it seemed... a number of them seemed to want a quick fling or a bit of excitement. The single male whose wife has just left him, he... I think he basically just wants a relationship because he doesn't understand why no woman can stay with him and he just wants someone he can connect with really.
Any criticisms of the production? Generally you've been extremely complimentary.
No, no... I suppose the funny thing about the play is that nothing gets too serious. I mean we see a number of different potential affairs starting between the characters -- but because it's a party it all dissipates and fizzles out in the night. For example, we think that the artist may end up with Cooley, but in the end that fizzles out too... I suppose it raises your expectation of another showdown, but then you think, Oh what can happen, because she's off with someone else.
So Williamson can go write Don's Party 2.
Well, I think he possibly could, yeah.
General comments about the play? About the play itself if you like, or the production. Any other comments?
I love the different voices for the different characters. The well-educated Australians, and the... the suburban housewife...
I liked the pervert who photographs his wife having sex with other people ("Mack", played by Travis McMahon).
That was just weird.
So, David fucking Williamson has made you think a lot more than some of these other plays that you've been going to lately?
Well, he portrays life as it is and it's just basically a reflection of where Australians are at at a particular point in time. And in one way I think the party is meant to symbolize Australia as a country or a culture -- within a predominantly working-class Labor, but, you know, your occasional blue-blood Liberal, but in the end everyone meshes together regardless.
It's all a big nice happy dysfunctional family. HAL, thanks for your time.
The Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company production of Don's Party is playing at the Opera House's Drama Theatre from Friday 14 September to Saturday 27 October 2007. More information is available from the STC website.
Written by David Williamson.
Director -- Peter Evans
Set and costume designer -- Dale Ferguson (a beautiful job)
Lighting designer -- Matt Scott
Composer and sound designer -- Basil Hogios
Steve Le Marquand as "Don".
Mandy McElhinney as "Kath".
Glenn Hazeldine as "Simon".
Felicity Price as "Jody".
Christopher Pitman as "Mal".
Alison Whyte as "Jenny".
Travis McMahon as "Mack".
Colin Lane as "Evan".
Caroline Brazier as "Kerry".
Rhys Muldoon as "Cooley".
Jacinta Stapleton as "Susan".
Some quotes from the programme: --
Paul Galloway writes:
-- "Perhaps David Williamson regrets once describing his role as 'storyteller to the tribe'... But who is this tribe?... Williamson settled into satirizing the Anglo-Celtic middle class, his own urban, ambitious, literate tribe... For 35 years he has been this tribe's myth-maker, part sceptic, part psychoanalyst and part shaman, exposing its follies, diagnosing its neuroses, and interpreting its dreams."
-- "Looking back, The Removalists and Don's Party, with their ocker aggression, seem to capture the rebellious, over-compensating assertion of early seventies Australia".
-- "[A]s the tallest of poppies, he is ripe for scything. Surely, the suspicion goes, no one so box-office friendly and who produces work so regularly can be that good. He is also victim of the assumption that those who make us laugh lack depth... A common criticism is that one Williamson play is pretty much the same as the next, a patent myth dispelled by a glance at his body of work."
-- "The setting is often a boardroom or a living room furnished with a door or two to admit complications and a drinks cabinet to fuel the enmity; the plot throws in precisely timed revelations; and the characters, each sequestered in an entrenched position, contend robustly and comically together... the Williamson dramatic world is a touch or two larger than life."
David Williamson writes:
-- "I had attended several parties, two of them on election nights, where alcohol had released tensions of ambition, frustration, envy, sexual desire and thwarted idealism, which were always there under the facade of the white picket fence. People who had married in their early twenties... were now hitting their thirties, and the edges of their lives were fraying... and the grandiose dreams they had held for their futures were crumbling before their eyes. It was an era in which feminism had barely dawned and the sexual revolution promised by the swinging sixties was being revealed as little more than a male fantasy of unbridled promiscuity."
-- Don's Party is called a comedy, but there's a lot of sadness at its core. When we laugh it is at the self-deceit the characters allow themselves to exhibit, for we recognise all too well that self-deceit is a necessary survival tool for all of us."
Glenn Hazeldine writes:
-- "[Williamson's] plays demand energy and bold straightforward clarity in performance... I can hear my acting teacher at drama school, Jennifer Hagan, bellowing as we struggled to imbue our Shakespeare scene-work with psychological subtext: 'Cut it out! The characters are not hiding anything from the audience. Reveal! Don't conceal!'"
-- "More than once I have heard directors refer to the performance style required for a Williamson play as non-naturalistic."
-- "I remember [Wayne Harrison's] coaching in the big rehearsal room at the Wharf Theatre: 'Trust the text. Cut out all the little "ums" and "ahs" and say what has been written. Be bold, face the front and speak clearly.'"
-- "Williamson provides a dense kernel and it is the actor's task to... present a fully-fleshed portrayal the audience can easily recognise".
-- "As in any well-constructed play, if you're committed to the emotional truth of the scene, and dancing in step with your cast-mates, there's every chance you'll find yourself in powerful contact with the audience."
Further reading: --
-- Sydney Theatre Company website
-- Review in The Age by Martin Ball (the production played in Melbourne in January-February). Ball insightfully (because I agree with him) notes: "As the host Don, Steve Le Marquand seems disengaged with everything and everyone around him. It's relevant in terms of Don's persona, but as the central character the show probably needs him to have more ballast." Also mentions: "it explores the domestic politics of marriage and the petty compensations people create for their failures."
-- Alison Croggon's review at Theatre Notes is rich in sharp observations, including: "It's the play as social document par excellence" (which is supposed to be mixed praise), "no matter how you cut it, the hero is Cooley (Rhys Muldoon). The women adore him and the men want to be him", and "This play certainly satirises the follies of the middle classes, but the real question is: at what point does it begin to celebrate them?"
~~~
So, David fucking Williamson.
You don't like David Williamson?
Some people like him, and some people don't. I guess I'm one of those that don't.
Why?
Well, he earns enough money for me to hate him.
David Williamson is one of the leading social commentators of our time.
If you like your commentary skin deep.
He records Australia as it is and no one else does that as well as he does.
I suppose that's true. But is it entertaining to watch Australia as it is?
He makes Australia accessible to the everyday of the street, his playwrighting is accessible, everybody identifies with it, they understand it.
And they walk out of it a little dumber than they walk in.
What are you saying about the average Australian?
Didn't you think that that was just a glorified sitcom?
Well, to some extent, but it portrayed Australia in the 1970s and I could identify with it down to the orange chair covers and the cane wicker chair. I mean, my parents used to have that, and it was just like a flashback.
I've got to hand it to the guy that it's kind of an artform to balance... however many characters there were... probably about ten characters at once.
Eleven.
Eleven characters.
Weren't you watching?
And there's always an issue whether all of the characters are sufficiently developed, and no they weren't, but that's just because to balance eleven characters you need some degree of stereotyping. And that's forgivable in this sort of medium, because in comedy you always have commedia dell'arte characters, you have these sort of stock characters... You've got a funny expression on your face.
Ohhhh kay.
When you look back, which characters stood out as having distinct characters? And which fade into the mush?
Actually for me they all had distinct characters.
Even the women?
Yeah! Absolutely.
All right, which characters did you like?
Well, I loved lots of them, but, um... particularly liked... what's her name... the Liberal ("Jody", played by Felicity Price)... I mean, that was just hysterical.
It does show that you can't remember their names, even though you remember their characters.
Well, names, who cares, names names, what does that mean.
And you also liked her because you vote Liberal.
It's a secret ballot.
You're the first person I've met who admits to voting Liberal, as the play says. But, okay, the play wasn't really about politics so much, right?
Well, it was set against politics.
It's all about sex really.
It's a mixture. It's about how people... how these people identify, see themselves, and what their aspirations are. And it's about their... the things in their life that they're not happy with, or... And how people on the surface can look as though they're the perfect couple and you scratch the surface and they have all these anxieties and --
And they all want to shag each other.
Well, you have to look at the cause of why they want to do that. It's because they're discontented or they're struggling to... find themselves or be something or go somewhere in their lives, so they think that's going to solve all their problems.
It's allgedly set in 1969.
[Laughs]
I don't know why you're laughing. But is that meant to be a commentary on... I don't know... on the whole sort of spirit of the times or something like that?
I would say it was. Although, I think in the brochure it said that it was supposed to be showing, you know, that Australians were... upwardly mobile astute well-educated people and they were discussing issues that were occurring... To be honest with you, I didn't think the play showed anyone particularly favourably, I mean none of them had any class...
Was it funny?
Yes it is. Funny in more an interesting way.
Not funny in a ha-ha way?
Oh yeah, that too, at times, but more sort of interesting... I mean to be honest with you I think the group of people... the characters they were supposed to be, they were... in many ways more well-educated than the average Australian, so they were showing a group of people there that if they were meant to be the average Australian... Not everybody has gone to university, whereas all of those characters, on the whole they were university-educated, so in that way they're not representative. The ironic thing is that even though they were allegedly better-educated than the average person they still lacked class of any kind.
You didn't think that Cooley (Rhys Muldoon) was rather suave.
Oh, he was revolting. Absolutely revolting.
Did you feel sympathetic towards Don (Steve Le Marquand) and his psychologist mate ("Mal", played by Christopher Pitman) because of their lost ambitions?
I thought they were a bunch of whinging useless males. I mean, really, their wives were the backbone of their lives, and they... they just were boys that had never grown up.
Would you liked to have gone to that party?
Um, no. No, much preferred to have been an observer.
Looked like a fun party to me. So personally I thought that all the actors gave... well I thought very good performances. I don't know whether I'm getting soft in my old age, I've been saying that about a lot of people lately, but I thought they were good performances.
They were. Yeah, they were. They played their characters exactly, to a tee.
And I'm not sure what it is about comic acting. I mean, it's reactive like normal acting but it's also sort of slightly... I don't know... people with funny faces or whatever, and I thought they... whatever comic acting is, they did it well.
I thought first and foremost it was truthful acting, and then the comedy was as a result of them playing the characters truthfully. Because there was quite a serious side to the comedy -- it was, you know, about people's discontent with their lives and their feelings of being trapped in whatever situation they were in at the time.
It was also... when they all get drunk... there's a little bit of over-the-topness, isn't there?
No. No no no, I think when people get drunk they generally are over the top. Actually, one of the themes that come across for me was how restricted people felt by the marriages they were in, and a strong thing for me was how the women felt that the men were trapping them by marriage... And in the party you see the women variously breaking out against whatever bind they feel their husband has over them, they're saying, you know, I'm not your property, I can go to this party, I don't have to go home with you, I decide when I go home, you don't own me --
"You don't own me."
Well, I don't know when that song was around but maybe it's from that era. That sort of came across quite strongly to me, and perhaps when this was written that was quite ground-breaking, I don't know.
In what sense did Don's wife ("Kath", played by Mandy McElhinney) say to her husband "you don't own me"?
I think Don was too childlike to be even slightly... He was probably the least possessive, but then he just expected her to put up with his party and not invite any of her friends, and she says Stuff you, I've invited Jody and Simon, and so that was sort of her act of asserting herself...
Do they love each other?
Yes, but I think there's different layers of... They've obviously been through ups and downs, and I don't think her husband has ever, Don has ever grown up.
What about the managerial consultant, his wife ("Jenny", played by Alison Whyte). How does she tell him to piss off?
Well I think she's what I suppose they call a passive aggressive. I mean all her aggression is directed inward, and she's... well, depressed actually. So instead of being outwardly aggressive, she's more internalized her aggression... And she's basically fed up with being the poor provider and having four kids and not feeling like she's in control of her life or doing what she wants to do, so...
But she seemed to live through her children.
Well, I suppose the question is... I mean ,she can no longer work, so that they're her life, she's so busy looking after them that she doesn't have time to do anything else or to think about herself and they don't have the money for her to do that, so she feels trapped by her social circumstances.
What about the males, what do they want?
Well, it seemed... a number of them seemed to want a quick fling or a bit of excitement. The single male whose wife has just left him, he... I think he basically just wants a relationship because he doesn't understand why no woman can stay with him and he just wants someone he can connect with really.
Any criticisms of the production? Generally you've been extremely complimentary.
No, no... I suppose the funny thing about the play is that nothing gets too serious. I mean we see a number of different potential affairs starting between the characters -- but because it's a party it all dissipates and fizzles out in the night. For example, we think that the artist may end up with Cooley, but in the end that fizzles out too... I suppose it raises your expectation of another showdown, but then you think, Oh what can happen, because she's off with someone else.
So Williamson can go write Don's Party 2.
Well, I think he possibly could, yeah.
General comments about the play? About the play itself if you like, or the production. Any other comments?
I love the different voices for the different characters. The well-educated Australians, and the... the suburban housewife...
I liked the pervert who photographs his wife having sex with other people ("Mack", played by Travis McMahon).
That was just weird.
So, David fucking Williamson has made you think a lot more than some of these other plays that you've been going to lately?
Well, he portrays life as it is and it's just basically a reflection of where Australians are at at a particular point in time. And in one way I think the party is meant to symbolize Australia as a country or a culture -- within a predominantly working-class Labor, but, you know, your occasional blue-blood Liberal, but in the end everyone meshes together regardless.
It's all a big nice happy dysfunctional family. HAL, thanks for your time.
~~~
The Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company production of Don's Party is playing at the Opera House's Drama Theatre from Friday 14 September to Saturday 27 October 2007. More information is available from the STC website.
~~~
Written by David Williamson.
Director -- Peter Evans
Set and costume designer -- Dale Ferguson (a beautiful job)
Lighting designer -- Matt Scott
Composer and sound designer -- Basil Hogios
Steve Le Marquand as "Don".
Mandy McElhinney as "Kath".
Glenn Hazeldine as "Simon".
Felicity Price as "Jody".
Christopher Pitman as "Mal".
Alison Whyte as "Jenny".
Travis McMahon as "Mack".
Colin Lane as "Evan".
Caroline Brazier as "Kerry".
Rhys Muldoon as "Cooley".
Jacinta Stapleton as "Susan".
~~~
Some quotes from the programme: --
Paul Galloway writes:
-- "Perhaps David Williamson regrets once describing his role as 'storyteller to the tribe'... But who is this tribe?... Williamson settled into satirizing the Anglo-Celtic middle class, his own urban, ambitious, literate tribe... For 35 years he has been this tribe's myth-maker, part sceptic, part psychoanalyst and part shaman, exposing its follies, diagnosing its neuroses, and interpreting its dreams."
-- "Looking back, The Removalists and Don's Party, with their ocker aggression, seem to capture the rebellious, over-compensating assertion of early seventies Australia".
-- "[A]s the tallest of poppies, he is ripe for scything. Surely, the suspicion goes, no one so box-office friendly and who produces work so regularly can be that good. He is also victim of the assumption that those who make us laugh lack depth... A common criticism is that one Williamson play is pretty much the same as the next, a patent myth dispelled by a glance at his body of work."
-- "The setting is often a boardroom or a living room furnished with a door or two to admit complications and a drinks cabinet to fuel the enmity; the plot throws in precisely timed revelations; and the characters, each sequestered in an entrenched position, contend robustly and comically together... the Williamson dramatic world is a touch or two larger than life."
David Williamson writes:
-- "I had attended several parties, two of them on election nights, where alcohol had released tensions of ambition, frustration, envy, sexual desire and thwarted idealism, which were always there under the facade of the white picket fence. People who had married in their early twenties... were now hitting their thirties, and the edges of their lives were fraying... and the grandiose dreams they had held for their futures were crumbling before their eyes. It was an era in which feminism had barely dawned and the sexual revolution promised by the swinging sixties was being revealed as little more than a male fantasy of unbridled promiscuity."
-- Don's Party is called a comedy, but there's a lot of sadness at its core. When we laugh it is at the self-deceit the characters allow themselves to exhibit, for we recognise all too well that self-deceit is a necessary survival tool for all of us."
Glenn Hazeldine writes:
-- "[Williamson's] plays demand energy and bold straightforward clarity in performance... I can hear my acting teacher at drama school, Jennifer Hagan, bellowing as we struggled to imbue our Shakespeare scene-work with psychological subtext: 'Cut it out! The characters are not hiding anything from the audience. Reveal! Don't conceal!'"
-- "More than once I have heard directors refer to the performance style required for a Williamson play as non-naturalistic."
-- "I remember [Wayne Harrison's] coaching in the big rehearsal room at the Wharf Theatre: 'Trust the text. Cut out all the little "ums" and "ahs" and say what has been written. Be bold, face the front and speak clearly.'"
-- "Williamson provides a dense kernel and it is the actor's task to... present a fully-fleshed portrayal the audience can easily recognise".
-- "As in any well-constructed play, if you're committed to the emotional truth of the scene, and dancing in step with your cast-mates, there's every chance you'll find yourself in powerful contact with the audience."
~~~
Further reading: --
-- Sydney Theatre Company website
-- Review in The Age by Martin Ball (the production played in Melbourne in January-February). Ball insightfully (because I agree with him) notes: "As the host Don, Steve Le Marquand seems disengaged with everything and everyone around him. It's relevant in terms of Don's persona, but as the central character the show probably needs him to have more ballast." Also mentions: "it explores the domestic politics of marriage and the petty compensations people create for their failures."
-- Alison Croggon's review at Theatre Notes is rich in sharp observations, including: "It's the play as social document par excellence" (which is supposed to be mixed praise), "no matter how you cut it, the hero is Cooley (Rhys Muldoon). The women adore him and the men want to be him", and "This play certainly satirises the follies of the middle classes, but the real question is: at what point does it begin to celebrate them?"
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