Australian playwright David Williamson comes out of retirement to confront nonmonogamy in “The Puzzle”

Playwright David Williamson has satirized white middle-class life for over 50 years.

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

His latest film The Puzzle, currently playing at the State Theater Company South Australia, is a playful exploration of the idea of ​​non-monogamy, from swingers to polyamorous relationships.

The plot centers on Erik Thomson (Packed to the Rafters; ABC TV Aftertaste) as divorced father Drew, who tries to reconnect with his twenty-year-old daughter Cassie while on a Mediterranean cruise. Except he unknowingly booked the wrong vacation: a swingers cruise.

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

“Everything that can go wrong does go wrong,” Williamson says. “It’s basically a comedy, but it shows that people who have every advantage in life and shouldn’t spoil their lives still do it with monotonous regularity.

“You think that people who aren’t threatened by daily bombings or who haven’t been displaced should be reasonably happy with their lives, but that’s often not the case. I find it fascinating.”

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

Next year will see four of Williamson’s plays grace Australia’s main stages: Ensemble will host Aria and a new production of his 1987 play, Emerald City, Melbourne Theater Company will stage a revival of his 1971 classic, The Removalists, and Queensland Theater will revive 2010 Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica. He is also working on several new performances, which are scheduled to premiere in 2026.

Drawing from life (but not much)

The puzzles are loosely inspired by Williamson’s experiences as a self-proclaimed “lazy tourist” who loves cruising.

“You just hop on, they take you everywhere and you don’t have to do much,” he says. “And when travelers spend a day at sea, they gather in the recreation room, doing puzzles and talking to people they wouldn’t necessarily meet on a daily basis.

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

However, the play is by no means drawn from real life: Williamson has never tried swinging, although he and his wife Kristin were in an open marriage in the 1970s and 1980s (which Kristin wrote about in her 2009 biography of Williamson).

“It was a disaster,” he says.

This period of open marriage and later romances ended in the late 1980s when Williamson fell in love with another woman and decided to leave the marriage, only to return home eight hours later.

He soon transferred his ideas about the effects of betrayal to the stage: in Top Silk (1989) and Syrena (1990). As Kristin described it to ABC News in 2009: “He wrote two plays, both about men who went astray and almost broke up their marriages, but then felt pretty stupid about it.”

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

“It’s fascinating how our sex drive has disrupted life over the centuries. “If you look at gossip columns and even great novels like Anna Karenina, the driving force is infidelity,” he says.

“The play says that a lot of people are not equipped to be monogamous for 50 years of their lives and that’s a problem… (And) the broader thing I’m looking at is the way that life is disrupted by (sex).”

A minor miracle

Born in Melbourne and raised in regional Victoria, Williamson studied engineering at university in the 1960s, where he first began writing and performing in university revues.

His engineering career was short-lived and in 1966 he returned to university to study social psychology. At the same time, he began writing and performing with La Mama and Pram Factory, part of a burgeoning scene that championed the contemporary Australian voice.

Success in plays such as Don’s Party and The Removalists followed quickly. But Williamson recalls a journalist telling him it wouldn’t last: “Listen, all the critics are upset with you right now, but they’ll be bored with you. They’re going to want a new kid on the block.”

Nevertheless, the journalist gave him advice that he still follows today: keep writing plays that his audience will like.

“It was a wake-up call for me to not take it for granted and to make sure my plays were as relevant and entertaining as possible,” Williamson says.

He attributes his longevity to his understanding: “You can’t bore the audience.”

“You have to keep them engaged with the characters, but I didn’t want to be trivial. I wanted to really dig deeper into human nature to understand the forces that drive us.”

This is an interest that has accompanied him since his postgraduate studies, which he planned to continue until his writing career took off.

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

“I always thought of my plays as social psychology experiments that I would conduct as an academic, but on stage.”

The challenge facing new playwrights

In 2020, Williamson retired from theater, citing health problems and a desire to make room for new, younger writers.

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

“The accusation that I keep young voices off stages is nonsense,” he says. “What kept young voices off the stage was another production of The Importance of Being Earnest, something that theater companies felt was safe.”

While the young Williamson and his peers, including the late Jack Hibberd, faced industry reluctance to produce new Australian works, the playwright believes it is harder to be an emerging playwright now than it was in the 1970s.

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

“More and more, it’s back to the formula of the 1960s: get a famous hit from New York or London, record your Shakespeare, and then find an Australian novel or a foreign novel to get the rights to, or even a film to translate back into on stage… Do anything but don’t allow new Australian lyrics on your stage because it’s risky.”

For Williamson, the appeal of live theater is to find out what happens next, rather than watching a new, brilliantly produced production of a story he already knows, such as one of those novels, Hamlet or The Cherry Orchard.

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

Riddle can be seen at the State Theater Center South Australia until October 12.