The good engineer
After the Ball
By David Williamson
With Judi Farr, Peter Carroll, Jacki Weaver and Garry McDonald
Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre
Until June 6
By Mark Stoyich
Australia's most successful man of the theatre has no sense of the theatrical. This paradox is as it should be — Australians are not a very theatrical people, we're not Italian or Balinese, and David Williamson is the most Australian of playwrights.
Many from overseas see Australians as a mild, safe, sporadically amusing people, and a Williamson play is just that. His latest, After the Ball, is an enjoyable and mildly interesting — at times quite interesting — look at a couple's unhappy marriage and its effect on their two children.
The couple — based on Williamson's parents and acted perfectly by Judi Farr and Peter Carroll — are of the Depression generation. They have stuck together through 50 years of hell, separated by a lack of mutual interests and one of those mild class differences that loom so large in the eyes of Melburnians but are invisible to anyone else.
He is aspirant middle class, pro-British; she works at Myers and is very Australian. Their daughter is liberal, pro-Asian; their son, who demonstrates against the Vietnam War and is pro-Whitlam, escapes the rise of Fraser, Australian deadness and his bickering parents, to live in Europe.
The whole Australian story, in four characters and two hours, not counting interval! That's the Williamson genius. And if one of the characters had been Catholic, we could have got the sectarian angle as well. Alas, there is only so much even David Williamson can get into one play.
The best things in After the Ball are what Williamson takes directly from his own parents — the prickly, sometimes bitter exchanges between the father who puts his wife down for her lack of education and the feisty mother who attacks her husband for his dull enthusiasms and eases her longings for more excitement with amateur theatre. All this rings true, and the scenes of the parents' sparring found most favour with the audience.
Their grown-up children are cosily portrayed by Jacki Weaver and Garry McDonald, but their parts are less convincingly written. McDonald's character has gone to France to make art movies but instead is making cigarette commercials to be screened in the Third World, much to the horror of his sister. He has also married a French woman, apparently an even worse crime. Secretly he misses Australia, finds his life shallow and unhappy.
In a recent interview with David Marr, Williamson said that the duty of the playwright is to analyse society. This is what makes Chekhov great, he said. The remark explains a lot.
Williamson started off as a lecturer in engineering, and that's what he's remained: a social engineer — intelligent and methodical, meticulously taking apart and examining the behaviour of the people around him, giving all the bits some oil (witty one-liners, bitchy dialogue) and reassembling them to whirr away to the delight of an audience that can appreciate a nice piece of machinery when it sees it, much like the BMW many drove to the theatre in.
His reference to Chekhov is partly true: the Russian writer did faithfully reflect his society, in which people lived at the height of their emotions, a society with a long history of real suffering. Williamson reflects his society, one which has none of these things.
It used to be fashionable to deride Williamson as "bourgeois" to explain his popular success. This missed the point. Engineer Williamson does exactly what he's expected to do, and skilfully. His limitations are the limitations of the country he so accurately describes and the audience he consistently serves.