It’s 10am and the sun is already bouncing hard off the Sydney Opera House forecourt where I’m due to meet one of Australia’s most prolific and awarded writers for stage and screen.
David Williamson arrives on cue and is hard to miss. A head-and-something taller than the throng of sightseers and tour groups, he looms over the shirtless joggers gleaming in the sun and kids on bikes weaving through the crowds. He politely skirts past a photoshoot bride clutching an unruly bunch of sunburst dahlias.
At 82, Williamson is an elder statesman of the theatre and in 2024, despite retiring several times in the past decade or so, he is very busy.
His latest play, The Great Divide, is opening at Sydney’s Ensemble theatre this week. Later in the year, another new play, The Puzzle, opens in Adelaide and another, Aria (directed by son Rory and starring son Felix), has an out-of-town season in Noosa before a season at the Ensemble in 2025. Williamson is the least retired 82-year-old you’ll ever meet.
“I’ve always loved walking around here, through the botanic garden, and up to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair and into the art gallery before it gets too hot,” says Williamson. On this occasion, however, we’re already about an hour into “too hot”.
“Sydney is a stunning city, but it’s a young person’s city,” he says, eyeing off an empty bench in the middle distance. “It’s almost unmanageable as you get older, just getting from A to B and finding a parking spot. It’s an exciting city but you need a lot of energy.”
Today, Williamson confesses, “I’m functioning on about two cylinders”. He loves walking but these days his exercise preference is a gentle morning swim in the lap pool at his home in Noosa.
He’s also recovering from a double whammy of Covid and influenza. “I’m still feeling the effects, but luckily I had all my vaccinations, otherwise, I think I might be dead by now,” he says, bluntly. We agree that our planned walk through the botanic gardens will be a bit shorter than anticipated.
Williamson towers over me – he’s 2m tall – and he still has a tall man’s stride. After a few minutes, I’m relieved when he suggests we settle on a park bench shaded by tree ferns.
Sydney Opera House looms large in the view, as it does in Williamson’s career. Its theatres played host many of his biggest commercial triumphs in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. He was box office gold for Sydney Theatre Company, famous for holding up a mirror to upper middle-class Australian audiences and making them laugh at their reflection. Politicians, shock jocks, academics, real estate agents and art market speculators all copped a serve over the decades. Interesting aside: Madonna played an art dealer willing to strap on a dildo to please a client in his play Up for Grabs in London in 2002.
Williamson is in town for the last few rehearsals and the opening night of The Great Divide, a story that pits a supermarket shelf-stacker against a property developer secretly buying up the town in order to turn it into an exclusive retirement/lifestyle destination.
“Like a lot of my plays, it was sparked by anger,” says Williamson. “[Economists] Friedman and Hayek told us we mustn’t tax the rich, we must let them keep as much money as we can, because then they’ll use all this money reinvested in productive industries, employ people, and all that wealth will trickle back down to us. In fact, it didn’t. All that neoliberalism has done for us is made the top tier of Australians very wealthy.”
The Great Divide is a “David v Goliath story” he says, but from a realist’s perspective. “In real life, Goliath always wins,” he says. “But in a drama, you can tilt the balance a little bit.”
Has living in the white-shoe haven of Noosa mellowed him at all, then? “Oh, I still get fired up,” he smiles. “By hypocrisy, by politicians on both sides telling us that we live in the greatest country on Earth yet won’t do anything to address what’s so obviously wrong with it.
“Australian drama hasn’t addressed inequality for 40 years! It’s been obsessed with identity politics, which has brought many strong new writers, many good plays, but it has ignored the elephant in the room – that we are an unfair and unequal society. The notion of class, which is a huge factor in Australia, has totally disappeared from our stages.”
He did enjoy Sydney Theatre Company’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, he says. “The technical wizardry, and the performance skills … amazing. But personally, Kris [his wife] and I were bored stiff. We know that story. I go to the theatre to see a story I don’t know!
“And it was the same when STC did Jekyll and Hyde. Technical wizardry again and two of the finest actors in the country – but drama is not narrating a novel!”
Williamson has a theory. Maybe we’re in a bread and circuses period? “Maybe it’s to offset the lure of the big 90-inch TV screens? It’s like we’re back in the days of [early 20th century impresario] Bland Holt. The staging and the wizardry of the sets were what the audience came to see. He used to stage Australian bushranger dramas with live horses on stage. He had an elephant on stage. The plays were pretty humdrum, but the effects were amazing and that’s all people were interested in.”
Sitting here, Williamson seems to have got his breath back. I begin to suspect he can talk like this for hours. “It’s getting like Hollywood,” he says. “Hollywood will only do films whose stories have proved themselves in some other medium – like a book or in an earlier film. They will not risk an untried story. And theatres are becoming the same. It’s all about adapting novels and director’s theatre, that ‘look at me, look at me’ style. Pure playwriting has become, to some extent, ghettoised.”
He looks out at the harbour. A tall ship is gliding by. “It’s actually very nice sitting here,” he says. “You know, I’m still a great believer in the words of the American playwright David Mamet, who, when asked why people came to the theatre, said it was to see what happens next. I love a situation where characters come on stage, you have no idea who they are, what they stand for, what their characters are like, what their conflicts are, and it unfolds in front of you. Theatre at its very best is enthralling, and I want people to experience that. I know it’s old fashioned and we should have pyrotechnics, but I still feel drama is about unfolding characters and conflicts and that’s what I try and do.”
Williamson gets a phone call: time’s up. We say our goodbyes but, as always, he has more to say. Walking across the Opera House forecourt, my phone lights up with a message. It’s Williamson.
“One of Bland Holt’s most famous plays was The Breaking of the Drought, in which he somehow managed to create a full-on flood onstage,” he says in the text message. “Perhaps ripe for revival at the Sydney Theatre Company?”
The Great Divide is playing at the Ensemble theatre in Sydney now, until 27 April.
