David Williamson has long called Queensland home and at 82 the acclaimed playwright shows no sign of retiring, despite rumours to the contrary. With another hit on his hands – The Puzzle, on stage in Adelaide – and a reboot of an old favourite, Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica, just announced for Queensland Theatre’s 2025, it’s time to check in with the master.
How many plays have you written, if you are counting?
I haven’t done a head count recently but I’m told it’s approaching 60.
The Puzzle is a hit in South Australia. How happy does that make you?
It’s still a thrill to sit in an opening night audience and feel that the play you wrote is connecting with the audience, which it certainly was. Mixing two bored middle-class couples seeking to spark up their life on a swingers cruise, with a 57-year-old conservative accountant trying to reconnect with his feisty 27-year-old daughter, was a risk, but Shannon Rush crafted an expert production with a top cast and it worked. On one level it’s a satire on our middle classes ability to make a mess of their privileged lives but at another level it’s looking at the fact that as a species not many of us find a lifetime of monogamy a totally thrilling prospect.
Is there still a thrill to see your words come to life on stage?
It’s certainly still a thrill, not only to see my words come to life but to see what skilled actors do to them to make them live. I’m often told by audience members that they saw me laughing at my own lines, but usually I’m reacting to what actors do with them.
It’s wonderful that Queensland Theatre is doing Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica next year. How does that make you feel and what does this play mean to you?
I’m delighted that QT is reviving Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica next year, especially as they’re using the original brilliant cast of Georgie Parker and Glen Hazeldine. It’s one of my gentlest plays and uses the old rom-com form of two people disliking each other at first sight but finding themselves attracted despite the shaky start. It’s loosely based on a good friend who was renovating her kitchen but who told me she couldn’t stand the loud country and western music her tradesman played as he worked. Six weeks later she turned up to the opening of a play with a handsome new man on her arm. Yes, it was the tradesman.
Have you ever regretted writing a play?
I wrote a play called Celluloid Heroes back in the early ’80s that was meant to be satire of our tax-break shonky film industry at the time. I had to go overseas to do rewrites for the movie Gallipoli and didn’t do my usual rewriting and polishing and I wasn’t around to listen to the feelings of my director John Bell and his cast. It was a very clumsy piece of work but it taught me a lesson that I must give everything I write from then on my full care and attention and be prepared to do many rewrites and polishes.
Do you have a favourite play and, if so, which one?
Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica is one of my favourites as it’s warm and funny and isn’t pushing any particular barrow except that finding a partner is one of the very important things in life. Dead White Males is another one I like a lot as it pokes fun at the over-the-top postmodern and woke sensibilities that were surfacing even back in the early ’90s when it was written. To declare Shakespeare unfit for modern sensibilities, as so many righteous university lecturers were and are doing, was a step too far for me, so I brought him back to defend himself against the slimy postmodern male feminist Dr Grant Swain who told his students that the Bard had nothing to offer.
Do people think they recognise themselves in your plays? Do you have to be careful about that?
I have had a few friends feel they were used in my early plays, which veered a little close to life, but thankfully they’re still my friends and since then I’ve always showed drafts of my plays to anyone I feel might see aspects of themselves and change anything they object to. I’ve had to change very little, to be honest, and the usual reaction is that audience members will tell me my characters are just like friends of theirs but never like themselves.
How long have you lived in Queensland now and can we consider you a Queenslander?
Kristin and I have lived here 28 years now, but we do still have an apartment in Sydney that we spend some time in, but Queensland is definitely home and I think that 28 years more or less qualifies us as Queenslanders.
Do you write every day? Is there a routine?
When I’m working on a new play, yes. I tend to get obsessed and work long hours to get it down on paper. I gather my characters, identify the situation and conflicts and have a rough idea where I’m headed, but new thoughts always crop up on the way. The first draft is fast to keep momentum but often overwritten and chaotic, so it takes a lot of rewrites from there.
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What are you really looking forward to?
A family holiday early in the new year when most of the clan will gather. With children, their partners and grandchildren the complete roll call is 26 and most will make it. It’s a great time to see everyone interacting. A lot of laughter and a little too much wine. Apart from that the big excitement for a playwright is always the next play. And in 2025 there’s a lot coming up. Aria at the Ensemble in Sydney in late January, a revival of The Removalists at the MTC in Melbourne in March, Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica at QT in Brisbane late May and a revival of Emerald City at the Ensemble in Sydney in August. An exciting year for me beyond that in 2026 is a new play, which I’m most excited about, called The Social Ladder, a satire about our species’ never-ending attempts to seek status and fame, and the cost of so doing. And after that maybe a rest.
Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica will play the Bille Brown Theatre, May 28-June 21, 2025.
queenslandtheatre.com
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