Forty years ago, a young playwright muscled his way onto the scene with a clutch of time-defining plays, including Don’s Party. With this sequel, David Williamson celebrates four decades of telling the tribe their story.

It’s 21 August 2010, the night of yet another federal election and, of course, yet another election night party at Don’s place. Over the decades, as he and his friends watched governments come and go, they have also closely followed the incoming results from each other’s lives: the tallies of luck and misfortune, the unexpected swings for and against. And through it all, the lesson that this crowd of superannuated baby boomers never seemed to learn is that politics and strong personalities should never be mixed with alcohol.

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If you don’t know who you are and you don’t know where you’re headed, you might find yourself spiralling in ever-tightening circles until you come to rest in a nondescript part of town in a crummy two-star hotel, where the service is churlish, the lift doesn’t work, the toast is burnt and the pot plants set off your allergies. But keep your expectations low, really low, and, who knows? – you might be pleasantly surprised by how everything works out.

A hotel with reservations. Award-winning playwright Daniel Keene’s play  is an eccentric fable about taking up residence and trying to move on.

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Awards

• 2011 QLD Premier's  Drama Script Award
• 2011 WA Premier's Award (shortlist)

Jeremy Glass is an untroubled little boy until his seventh birthday, when he suddenly announces that he is really a grown man called Danny, who died some years before. How can his parents indulge his conviction that he must find his real family? And how can his eerie insistence on his true identity not resurrect painful memories for Danny’s widow?
   
With songs from Tim Finn adding expressionistic commentary on the action, Matt Cameron’s Poor Boy delivers a supernatural story steeped in loss, anguish and redemption.

Published in conjunction with Melbourne Theatre Company.

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Awards

• 2009 VIC Premier's Literary Awards - Best Musical Theatre Script (shortlist)

Review

In the summer of 1939 in a small Moscow theatre a company of actors begins rehearsals of a new play to commemorate Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. It’s a tough gig, because for Soviet artists working towards the Radiant Future the old showbiz maxim ‘the show must go on’ is an order you can’t refuse.

Another opening, another show trial! Realism is a comedy of nerves, a backstage farce set in a pressure cooker. It’s about the spirit that makes art live and the forces that want to crush it.

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Awards

• 2009 VIC Premier's Literary Award -  Louis Esson Prize for Drama (shortlist)
• 2009 QLD Premier's Literary Award - Drama Award
• 2008 WA Premier's Literary Awards - Script Award (shortlist)
• 2007 Wal Cherry Award - Best New Play

Sidney can feel her career slipping down the plughole. No one loves a pop star when she’s forty – not if she isn’t Madonna or Kylie. So unless she wants to join the ranks of the has-beens on the casino circuit, she better get herself a hit. But what if she regains the whole world and still feels that something’s missing?

‘In this country, people are always talkin’ about dreams. You can be your dream. You can have your dream. You can live the dream. But that’s just a clever way of gettin’ people to shut up and stop complainin’.

When a great singer lets her voice float out over the anonymous crowd, or form the grooves of thousands of records, or flow through radios into millions of homes across the world, she makes countless unknown connections with people. The singer has her story and the listener hers, and should those stories touch each other, there can be magic. 

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Awards

• 2011 WA Premier's Award (shortlist)

Six young people from around the world, including two UWA students, spend one glorious summer together on a Greek island in 1983. They are beautiful, adventurous, idealistic and believe that the world is theirs for the taking. Fast-forward to 2009: each - in their own way - feel trapped by their life choices and are baffled by their children’s youth culture in the new millennium. Will a reunion on their magical Greek island be able to rekindle their spiritual fire?