Don's Party

Don’s Party is a 1971 play set during the 1969 Australian federal election, located in suburban Melbourne. Don Henderson is a schoolteacher living with his wife Kath. Out of what appears to boredom, he invites a small group of friends to celebrate a predicted Australian Labour Party election victory, to put an end to two decades of conservative rule. Sound familiar? Well…just over a decade at any rate. As the party wears on, it becomes clear that the ALP, who are supported by Don and most of the guests, are not winning as initially predicted. As a result, the drinking goes up a few notches, and the humorous banter between Don and his mates about their failed aspirations gets uglier, as does their behaviour towards the women. Meanwhile, the disillusioned wives exchange tales of their husbands’ ‘below par’ sexual prowess. By the end of the night, Don and some of his friends have begun to grasp the emptiness of their compromised lives. In this, as in other plays, David Williamson is interested in the way people struggle and conflict in group situations. The characters in Don's Party represents a wide range of ways of coping with social life. As in many of his plays, Williamson creates a rich and complex social world in which his characters are firmly set. They also indicate that the apparently loose, rambling progress of the play is in fact a carefully worked out study of human beings in their social context. The question of sympathy for the characters is another important issue in the study of Don's Party. By many standards the characters in the play are an extremely unattractive lot, and yet they seem to be treated very affectionately. The play partly satirises their foibles and partly celebrates their liveliness and humanity. The answer to this apparent contradiction may lie in an age-old theory that all comedy is based on pain. If the person slipping on the banana skin is an intimate friend you don't laugh, you rush sympathetically to help them. Laughter comes when you feel in some way distant from or superior to the misfortune – but the greater the original misfortune the greater the comedy. One fine achievement of Don's Party is to enable us to feel emotionally involved and comically distant by turns. Starring Michael Abercromby as Don, Louisa Fitzhardinge as Kath, James Marzec as Mal and Kate O'Sullivan as Jenny. Featuring Spencer Davis (Simon), Isabella Moore (Jody), Chris Gregory (Mack), Tim Cole (Evan), Jess Wilkinson (Kerry), Jack Quirk (Cooley) and Jess Dunn (Susan).