After 50 years and more than 50 plays, David Williamson is back to skewer non-monogamy

Playwright David Williamson has spent more than 50 years satirising the lives of the white middle-class.

The 82-year-old has written more than 50 plays, including the much-loved Don’s Party and The Club.

His latest, The Puzzle, on now at State Theatre Company South Australia, is a tongue-in-cheek exploration of ideas around non-monogamy, from swingers to polyamorous relationships.

It follows Erik Thomson (Packed to the Rafters; ABC TV’s Aftertaste) as divorced dad Drew, who tries to reconnect with his 20-something daughter, Cassie, on a Mediterranean culture cruise. Except he’s unwittingly booked the wrong holiday: a swinger’s cruise.

There, father and daughter (who herself is in a “polyamorous situation”) meet two couples who are trying to spice up their relationships: Mandy and Craig, and Brian and Michele.

“Everything that could go wrong does go wrong,” says Williamson. “It’s basically a comedy, but it’s making a point that people who have every advantage in life and shouldn’t muck up their lives still manage to do it with monotonous regularity.

“You think people who aren’t threatened by daily bombings or aren’t displaced should be fairly content with their lives, but regularly they’re not. I find that fascinating.”

The Puzzle is the latest in a string of new plays staged since Williamson came out of retirement earlier this year, with two others hitting Australian stages since January: The Great Divide at Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre in March; and Aria at his local Noosa Arts Theatre in April.

Next year, four Williamson plays will grace Australia’s main stages: Ensemble will host Aria and a new production of his 1987 play, Emerald City, while Melbourne Theatre Company will mount a revival of his 1971 classic, The Removalists, and Queensland Theatre will revive 2010’s Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica. And he’s working on a few more new plays, which he hopes will premiere in 2026.

“[Playwriting] is addictive. Once my health was good again, I couldn’t give up the addiction,” Williamson says.

Drawing from life (but not much)

The Puzzle is loosely inspired by Williamson’s experiences as a self-described “lazy tourist” who loves to take a cruise.

“You just get on and they take you to all the places, and you don’t have to do much,” he says. “And when travellers have a day at sea, they congregate in the recreation room, making jigsaw puzzles and talking to people they wouldn’t necessarily meet in everyday life.

“​​I thought, ‘What if people who shouldn’t meet do meet?'”

But the play is by no means drawn from real life: Williamson has never tried swinging, although he and his wife Kristin did have an open marriage in the 70s and 80s (which Kristin wrote about in her 2009 biography of Williamson).

“It was a disaster,” he says.

That period of open marriage, and later, of both of the couple having affairs, culminated in the late 80s when Williamson fell in love with another woman and resolved to leave his marriage, only to return home eight hours later.

Soon enough, he brought his ideas around the effects of infidelity to the stage: in Top Silk (1989) and Siren (1990). As Kristin described it to ABC News in 2009: “He wrote two plays, both about men who strayed and almost broke up their marriages and felt rather stupid about it afterwards.”

Now, Williamson says: “I look back on that as a horror period of my life, and my wife nearly didn’t ever forgive me, and I’m so glad to still be married to her.”

Instead of writing from his own life, or interviewing people in non-traditional romantic relationships, Williamson read widely about swingers and non-monogamy, including scientific studies and blog posts by polyamorous people.

“It is fascinating, over the ages, how much our sex drive has disrupted lives. If you look at the gossip columns, if you look at even the great novels like Anna Karenina, infidelity is the driving force,” he says.

“​​The play is saying a lot of humans aren’t designed to be monogamous for 50 years of their lives, and that’s a problem … [And] the wider thing I’m looking at is the way lives are disrupted by [sex].”

A minor miracle

Born in Melbourne and brought up in regional Victoria, Williamson studied engineering at university in the 60s, where he first started writing and performing in university revues.

His career as an engineer was short-lived, and he returned to uni to study social psychology in 1966. At the same time, he started to dip into writing and performing with La Mama and the Pram Factory, as part of a burgeoning scene that championed a contemporary Australian voice.

Success with plays like Don’s Party and The Removalists followed quickly. But Williamson recalls a journalist telling him that it wouldn’t last: “Look, the critics are all falling over backwards over you now but they’ll get tired of you. They’ll want the new kid on the block.”

Even so, that journalist also gave him advice he still follows to this day: to keep writing plays that appeal to his audience.

“It was a warning shot to me to not take it for granted and to make sure that my plays were as relevant and entertaining as possible,” Williamson says.

“The fact I’m still being staged 53 years after I started, and the fact that people are still coming in numbers to what I’m writing, is, to me, a minor miracle of survival.”

He credits his longevity to his understanding, “You cannot bore an audience”.

“You have to keep them involved in the characters, but I didn’t want to be trivial. I wanted to actually be looking at human nature in some depth to understand the forces that drive us.”

It’s an interest that’s followed him from his postgraduate study, which he had planned to continue until his writing career took off.

“Our lives are influenced by what other people think about us. We’re very social creatures, and we care desperately about how we’re thought about,” he says.

“I’ve always felt my plays were the experiments in social psychology that I would have been doing as an academic, but on stage.”

The challenge facing new playwrights

In 2020, Williamson retired from the theatre, citing health concerns and a desire to make space for new, younger writers.

He had long been accused of taking up too much space on Australian stages.

“The charge that I was keeping young voices off the stages was rubbish,” he says. “What was keeping young voices off the stage was yet another production of The Importance of Being Earnest, or what theatre companies considered safe.”

While a young Williamson and his peers, including the late Jack Hibberd, faced an industry reluctant to produce new Australian work, the playwright thinks it’s harder to be an emerging playwright now than in the 70s.

“I sometimes despair for new playwrights,” he says. “There were many more Australian plays done on mainstages back in the 70s and 80s than are done now.”

That means fewer opportunities for new playwrights, he says, as companies “play it safe” following a sharp decline in government funding.

“Increasingly, it’s back to the formula of the 60s: get a known hit from New York or London, do your Shakespeare, and then find an Australian novel or an overseas novel that you can get the rights of or even a film that you can translate back onto stage … Do anything but allow new Australian writing on your stage, because that’s risky.”

For Williamson, the appeal of live theatre is finding out what happens next, rather than seeing a new, brilliantly realised production of a story he already knows, like one of those novels, or Hamlet or The Cherry Orchard.

“I want to see characters come on stage and I don’t want to know where they’re headed. I want the story to unfold in front of me, and that’s what good new drama can do.”

The Puzzle is at State Theatre Centre South Australia until October 12.