The play Don’s Party premiered on August 11 1971 at Carlton’s Pram Factory, home to the radical theatre ensemble, the Australian Performing Arts Group. 

Established four years earlier in 1967, the group would nurture some of the most passionate Australian voices of a generation, including Max Gillies, John Romeril, Kerry Walker, Geoffrey Milne and Jenny Kemp. 

Until this point, there was very little original Australian theatre. With the exception of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), Australian stages were dominated by scripts imported from the UK and America.

This new generation was interested in creating a muscular, fiercely nationalistic form of theatre preoccupied with “staging the nation”.

Hot off the back of The Removalists at La Mama, Don’s Party was the fifth play by the young, engineering-student-turned playwright David Williamson.

Williamson’s hallmark satiric naturalism sat outside the collective’s experimental and confrontational aesthetic and there was some early resistance to programming the play.

But the explosive zeitgeist energy of Don’s Party and — as described by Graeme Blundell, who played Simon — the “gasp of recognition” from audiences couldn’t be ignored.

Don’s Party is a slice-of-life satire, set at an Australian barbecue hosted by 30-something couple Don and Kath on election night 1969. When the opposition Labour Party takes an early lead, all the couples at the party are elated — except for the “ring-ins”, Liberal voting couple Simon and Jody. 

As the election win slides away, the evening slowly descends into despair. 

The long, beery night, with guests milling in front of the television and wandering in and out of the lounge room, is laced with the unfinished sexual encounters, fist fights and drunken accusations that fuel the plot.

Williamson’s forensic characterisation nailed the social construction of party affiliation at the end of the 1960s. A new generation of left wing, middle class voters were challenging the puritanical and conservative culture of Australian politics. Williamson and many of his collaborators were born just at the beginning of what would become known as the Baby Boomers, and the play captured the fears and dreams of their audience. 

It’s not all politics. The comedy also comes from the permissive wife-swapping social milieu of the Australian middle classes in the late 1960s. Free love, swearing that would make your ears hurt, and detailed discussion of excretion were the hallmarks of the swinging Australian suburban sophisticate.

(In 2005, Williamson observed this period of wife-swapping only lasted a few years, finishing “as soon as women realised that this was as oppressive as what had proceeded it”.)

The play’s reception was electric. In a few short years it would go on productions at Jane Street Theatre in Sydney (1972); in the newly created Melbourne Theatre Company (1973); and the Royal Court in London (1976), cementing Williamson’s international critical reputation. 

Don’s Party signalled Williamson’s future as our most prolific playwright and king of the Australian middle-class, mainstream drama. 

The real imprint of the play on Australian culture came from its adaptation into film in 1976 by director Bruce Beresford and producer Philip Adams, the pioneers of 1970s ocker Ozploitation films.

Although Williamson wrote the screen adaptation, the film has a much more brutal tone. In a documentary, actor Susan Binney — who played “nymphette” university student Susan — says she still “shudders” when she recalls the filming of the pool scene where she was forcibly undressed and thrown into the pool by Don, Mal, Mack and Cooley. 

Binney wasn’t warned she would be thrown into the pool during rehearsals, as the sexist machismo of the story bled over into real life.

Williamson has also shared his disquiet about that scene and some of the other additions to the film that brought the off-stage bedroom of the original play into graphic cinematic world. 

Yet this bleed of 1970s ocker film genre into the more nuanced, gendered satire of Williamson’s script gave Don’s Party its enduring cultural impact. In its 50 years, the play has seen multiple remounts, a 2011 sequel Don Parties On (where the same friends gather on the night of the 2008 federal election) and pop culture tributes.

Contemporary theatre director Sam Strong notes how Williamson’s “enduring power is to speak directly to Australian audiences.” 

This year, the film was released on Netflix and Amazon Prime. A re-watch proves how fresh the work still is as a time capsule of the Boomer generation preparing to bring Australia into a globalised world, and a reminder of the often futile experience of the hapless Labour voter in barracking for what, in electoral terms, has been a long-term losing team.

Indeed, when I contemplate drinking my moderately-priced chardonnay on what is likely to be another sweaty election night eve sometime across the next eight months, I am haunted by the fear of enduring another Don’s Party.

https://theconversation.com/dons-party-at-50-an-achingly-real-portrayal-of-the-hapless-australian-middle-class-voter-165609

THE EDITORS OF THE FRONT COVER OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT IT FUNNILY CLEVER TO RING THE TITLE BELLS, BUT THE MESSAGE OF THE PLAY WAS TO SEND US TO THE DARK CORNERS OF AUSSIE POLITICS AND CRASS BEHAVIOUR, ALIGNED WITH THOSE OF THE YANKS'...

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Yes, there is an American ruling class, and we’ve now got the photos to prove it.

Not so long ago talking about the possible existence of a ruling class frequently induced eye-rolling and derision amongst ‘serious’ policymakers and commentators. Marx’s suggestion that the modern state is ‘but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ did seem a bit of a dated way of describing the complex reality of modern economic and political orders.

And yet during Donald Trump’s second inauguration prominent members of America’s ruling class lined up to have their photos taken with the president. No doubt many of America’s most prominent capitalists think that direct access to the most powerful man in the world will directly benefit their business interests, at least in the short term. They may be right. But surely someone like Elon Musk, who Trump describes as a ‘genius’, must recognise that things could go badly wrong in the longer term?

Of course, Trump’s not the best judge: he thinks he’s a genius, too. A more accurate assessment was provided by the president’s former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who called the Trump a ‘fucking moron’. An absence of any obvious talent, other than for self-promotion, is no obstacle to getting the most important job in the world, though. Perhaps we should get rid of democracy after all. Don’t worry, Donald’s team are on it.

Unfortunately, they don’t inspire confidence either. Is it possible that most of the people around Trump are either none too bright, obsessed with money-making and power, or just incapable of controlling their baser impulses? Musk’s Nazi salutes at the inauguration were not a good look even by his megalomaniacal standards. There’s a distinct possibility that Trump may either not have recognised its significance or cared if he did, of course.

Indeed, the merits of public decorum and probity are probably not ideas that get much of an airing in the Trumpian halls of power. After all, one of the first things the leader of the not-so-free world did on regaining the presidency was to monetise the moment by issuing a meme coin; which has no intrinsic value, is purely for speculation, and is likely to lead to many of his less well connected proletarian supporters to lose their money. Even Melania’s getting in on the act. The Trump clan are quite the advertisement for wholesome family values.

Among the many compelling reason for being alarmed about Trump’s return one stands out, however: his rapid winding back of essential but insufficient efforts to do something about climate change. To be fair, withdrawing from the Paris agreement is probably most important symbolically given its modest impact. But there’s a good chance that Trump genuinely thinks that the climate emergency has been cooked up by left wing academics, although quite why they would all want to do that has never been made clear.

By contrast, we know that many of Trump’s plutocratic supporters really do understand the danger unaddressed climate change poses, which is why they are buying up large chunks of New Zealand in the hope that they can ride out the looming climate apocalypse. Good luck with that. Perhaps Trump’s cronies are so beguiled by the possibility of making even more money that they are incapable of thinking about the relationship between free-market capitalism and the destruction of the natural environment upon which we all depend.

There really are limits to how far greed and self-interest can take us, though, and not just at the individual level either. On the contrary, the actions of the tech bros, and even the suckers who get in too late on the crypto scams, are all part of an economic system that looks increasingly past its use by date; quite useful initially to lift living standards and incentivise economic growth, but only at the eventual cost of wrecking the natural environment. Despite the fact that it’s becoming clear we need a different basis for a sustainable environment, these seem to be realities that leaders around the world are either incapable of recognising or studiously ignore because it suits their short-term political and economic interests to do so.

Maybe Trump really is too stupid to make sense of a complex world, but surely there must be some people in his orbit who can see how things could go badly wrong, if only as a consequence of triggering yet another economic crisis that was unambiguously made in America. You would think that would be the one thing the ruling class might recognise.

But before we start congratulating ourselves that at least we’re smarter than the Yanks, it’s worth remembering that sucking up to them has been the default foreign policy position for generations, no matter which party was in power. At this moment of increasing international uncertainty and environmental calamity it rather begs the question: who is the more stupid, those who create policies that are likely to cause catastrophe, or those who slavishly align themselves with them despite their well-grounded reservations?

https://johnmenadue.com/how-stupid-is-americas-ruling-class/

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