b"GOING OUT ON TOPAn interview with playwright David Williamson by Elissa Blake from Audrey JournalAustralias most prolific playwright, David Williamson, is preparing toFamily Values isnt about that specific and still-unfolding case, close a circle with a circumference of 50 years. Williamson adds, but it is inspired by the differences in opinion swirling Ive done my stint, he says from his home in Noosa, Queensland. Iaround the issue of Australias treatment of asylum seekers and count myself as having been 50 years in the writing business in 2020refugees. and Im not going to write anymore after that. In the Griffin Theatre Company production of Family Values, directed Followers of the playwrights career might recall that Williamson hasby Lee Lewis, and coming to Riverside Theatres in March, Andrew announced a retirement before.MacFarlane plays a judge of Australias High Court, a life-long conservative who has lived his professional life applying the black letter In 2005, dispirited by an emerging director-led theatre culture in Sydneyof the law. and laid low by a heart arrhythmia condition, it seemed that his playHis son is a born-again Christian and his daughters are cut from Influence, focused on a powerful Sydney radio shock jock, would be completely different cloth: one is a Border Force Officer; the other is a his last.left-wing activist helping an Iranian asylum seeker facing deportation It wasnt and by a very long way. More than 15 plays have poured outafter undergoing psychiatric treatment. since then, including a sequel to his classic Dons Party (Don Parties On),Its a play in which people who shouldnt be in the same room together a story of a cross-dressing footballer (2012s Managing Carmen) andhave to be in the same room together because theyre related, Rupert (2013), a portrait of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.Williamson says. So drama ensuesand comedy, too. Without that, the Barely a year has gone by without a Williamson premiere. situation would be unbearable.Thanks to a very ingenious operation, my health came good, but now IA Divided Australiathink Ive done enough, Williamson says. I want to go out while peopleFamily Values, Williamson says, is his attempt to straddle the many are still coming to my plays. I dont want to be staggering around thepolitical, social, generational and religious fracture zones hes observed place at 98, wondering why theres only a handful of people in the frontemerging over recent years. stalls. And Ive got five kids and 14 grandkids, so theres plenty for me to doIts a big ask for any play, but I think its right on the fault lines of where and I do think my last two plays are good ones. we are now. Australia today is a deeply divided nation.New Drama For example, Williamson says, 30 years ago, the accepted wisdom was that religion was on the way out.The first of those plays is Family Values, a black-comic drama probingThere was the idea that secular societies were home and hosed and the fault lines that divide contemporary Australia. It was inspired, hethat religion was a quaint, old medieval superstition that was going to says, by a newspaper article that simultaneously fired the playwrightsquietly die out. Yet nothing could have been further from the truth.imagination and indignation.I woke up one morning about three years ago and read a story thatReligion is a very strong presence now. Not as strong as America, made me very angry and ashamed to be Australian, Williamson recalls.obviously, where you can't even hope to ever be a politician without It was about the Tamil family from Biloela, people who had been livingbeing a Christian. I think we even had a Prime Minster briefly who was a happily in the community for three or four years and who had raised twoconfessed atheist. children there, and them being hauled out of bed at five in the morningBut certainly the influence of evangelism seems to be growing. When by members of Border Force. They got 15 minutes to pack what theyour current prime minister invites cameras into church to see him asking could. It was like the Stasi in East Germany. God for a favourits troubling.44"