David Williamson Plays
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 savagely funny play that hinges on the subtle aggression and unacknowledged dependencies of male friendship — and the angst and irritation created for those on the sidelines.
Cast : 3M, 2F
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?
Cast : 2M, 4F
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 them both. Commerce competes with art; serious writing with popular writing.
Set in Melbourne and New York, this is a tale of revenge as the best-selling expatriate author Katie Best engineers a scheme to bring her most craven critic Danny O’Loughlin undone.
Cast: 4M, 3F
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.
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 that this crowd of superannuated baby boomers never seemed to learn is that politics and strong personalities should never be mixed with alcohol.
Cast : 4M, 5F
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
A boisterous comedy for all ages. Flatfoot (aka Roman playwright Titus) pops up in the twenty-first century, enraged to find his ideas have been plundered through the ages by everyone from Shakespeare to modern-day sitcom writers.
To prove his point, he takes us back to Ancient Rome, where he must convince Dives that his new play will be a hit, neither offending the Roman Censor nor imbuing the servants with fanciful ideas. When he is forced to improvise, pandemonium lurks just around the corner.
Cast : 2M, 1F
The Great Man
A volatile group gathers to plan the funeral of a Labor Party icon. They all claim to know the truth about him, but their recollections are coloured by their own interests.
Cast : 4M, 3F
Sanctuary
An investigative journalist returns to Australia to retire. But the peace is broken by a visit from a student working on his biography.