Plays
Retired Federal Court Judge, Roger Collins hopes to celebrate his 70th birthday with his wife and three children. When his activist daughter turns up with Saba, an Iranian refugee on the run from Border Force and demands the keys of his holiday house to hide her, all hell breaks loose.
Cast: 2M, 5F…
Chrissie is working as an ambulance Paramedic when the Service’s director discovers that her qualifications are totally faked. He’s appalled. Lives have been put at risk for four years. Or have they? As Chrissie tells him her life story, he realises that things are a little more complex, and reflects on how her life contrasts with that of his own spoiled middle class daughter.
Cast: 4M, 3F…
Nearer the Gods: Isaac Newton fights his own inner demons and the power brokers of the Royal Society to prove his astonishingly brilliant theory of Universal Gravitation. Huge egos clash and drama and black humour abound, and finally it’s only the courage and persistence of the Astronomer Edmund Halley and his wife Mary, that make this great leap forward in human knowledge happen.
Cast: 7M, 2F
Sorting out Rachel: A social comedy about greed, legacy, entitlement, hidden family secrets, and the long overdue repair of fractured relationships.
Cast: 3F, 2M
The Big Time: Best friends and …
Williamson tackles the rise and rise of ex-Australian citizen and one of the planet’s most powerful, influential and feared men, Rupert Murdoch.
He asks who the real Rupert Murdoch is and tries to uncover what makes this complex and fascinating character tick.
Cast : 5M, 3F…
Stephen has, with ill grace, returned home to his mother’s deathbed. As he and his sister rake through the family photographs and childhood memories, they find conflicting versions of their parents’ unhappy marriage.
Cast : 3M, 6F…
In a moment of glory at the 1968 Olympics, an Australian rowing team known as ‘The Four Amigos’ won bronze. It was lifetime bonding material.
Or so it seemed. Thirty-five years later only two of the Amigos keep in touch. Jim is a wealthy banker with a young, beautiful wife and seems to have it all. His friend Dick, a heart surgeon, has something that Jim covets: a sterling reputation. When the two mates meet up in Port Douglas with their wives, they have competing personal agendas. Then Steven, a third Amigo, turns up, ready to expose the past.
A …
Birthrights
A bittersweet play about motherhood.
At twenty-nine, Helen has a vital operation that stops her from having what she desperately wants: a child. Her younger sister Claudia gives her a wonderful gift when she agrees to be a surrogate mother. But what happens when, years later, Claudia discovers that she and her husband Martin cannot conceive and that Kelly, the child she gave to her sister, is the only baby she will ever bear?
Soulmates
Williamson applies his merciless humour to the literary world in a play about the slippery business of books, authors, and the readers who love …
Williamson turns his penetrating eye and sharply focused wit to issues of ‘political correctness’ and sexual harassment. A serious comedy, Brilliant Lies is a stimulating contribution to the continuing debate on our changing social values.
Cast : 4M, 3F…
Williamson’s famous play about the uses and abuses of managerial power, which in 1976 foreshadowed the great changes that Australian football has since endured, proves even more prescient since the rise and fall of Super League. This is a play set behind the scenes, a head-on tackle of brawn versus bureaucracy.
Cast : 6M…
Postmodernism versus liberal humanism—can an older male academic convert a young female student to a post-structural, post-patriarchal view of literature and seduce her at the same time?
Cast : 6M, 5F…
Forty years ago, a young playwright muscled his way onto the scene with a clutch of time-defining plays, including Don’s Party. With this sequel, David Williamson celebrates four decades of telling the tribe their story.
It’s 21 August 2010, the night of yet another federal election and, of course, yet another election night party at Don’s place. Over the decades, as he and his friends watched governments come and go, they have also closely followed the incoming results from each other’s lives: the tallies of luck and misfortune, the unexpected swings for and against. And through it all, the lesson …
A fast-moving, wisecracking commentary on contemporary urban mores and morals, and the rivalries and passions to be encountered on the road to success. Colin, a screenwriter, and his wife Kate, a publisher, move to the ‘Emerald City’, where fame and fortune are there for the taking, but surprises are in store for them both.
Sharp-edged, staritical and accusatory, Emerald City lays into the materialism of the 1980s with a razor wit. Within four months of its premiere, five separate productions had opened around Australia.
Cast : 3M, 3F…