In this, as in other plays, David Williamson is interested in the way people struggle and conflict in group situations. The characters in Don's Party represent a wide range of ways of coping with social life. Don, the schoolteacher and failed novelist, copes by a mixture of relaxed detachment and debunking humour. He is not even seriously put out when Cooley attacks the very basis of his failure: his inability just to start writing, let alone write, the Great Australian Novel. Mal, the great 'politician' who in his own life has compromised all his political ideals, copes through child-like aggression. Each time he is rejected he comes back to start a fight with some new hapless victim. Mack, who has just been deserted by his wife (but who claims he left her) copes by means of an engaging openness about his pathetic inadequacy.

MACK: Am I a real kink?
COOLEY: Bloody oath.
MACK: Why do you think I did it?
COOLEY: Because you're a kink. (p. 62)

Cooley is an original larrikin, with a lawyer's income to support the habit. Of all the characters in the play he is the one who appears to cope best, and he is certainly one of the funniest characters in the play—yet he also embodies many of the less endearing aspects of what Williamson has called the 'awful Australian uniqueness'. He is vulgar, selfish, thoughtless, cowardly and disruptive, and yet he is so cheerfully self-sufficient that audiences always seem to like him. Perhaps that is a comment on them (and on Williamson's supposedly 'objective' portrayal of him) as much as on Cooley himself.

One of the great comic devices in Don's Party is the way that each character has such an appropriate set of social positions or attributes. Their jobs, for example, seem just right for their characters. Don is a schoolteacher (with a hobby of growing native plants). Mal is a psychologist, but in 'management consultancy', not private practice. (To impress Kerry he later says he is in 'executive selection'.) The humourless, pompous Liberal voter, Simon, is an accountant for a firm that makes 'plastic extrusions and polystyrene slabs'. Evan is a dentist (another serious, dull occupation it seems). His hobby is renovating. Mack is a design engineer whose hobby is taking pornographic photos of his wife. (One wonders what he designs.) Kerry is an artist, whose hobby seems to be her lover, Cam, who creates 'environments'. Susan is a student and part-time dancer (stripper, Cooley says). Jenny, Kath and Jody are mothers and housewives.

The pornographic objects the guests bring are also appropriate. Mal brings a cartoon pinched from Playboy, Simon a 'vaguely phallic' balsa model, Mack a nude photo of his estranged wife and Evan an abstract print which has no pretension to being pornographic but is good art. Cooley, of course, brings Susan.

Details such as this enable Williamson to create a rich and complex social world in which his characters are firmly set. They also indicate that the apparently loose, rambling progress of the play is in fact a carefully worked out study of human beings in their social context.

The characters of the women in Don's Party have been condemned by some critics as being shallow and insufficiently 'human'. Williamson has defended them on the grounds that in 1969 Australian women were in a powerless position, dependent on their men, and therefore the portrayals are accurate. Certainly the women come into their own at the end, when the men have declined into drunken stupors. The scene where Jenny tells Don of her feelings of frustration and despair reveals a lot about her, and, at least as played by Pat Bishop in the film of the play, is one of the scenes which many people remember as the most moving.

The question of sympathy for the characters is another important issue in the study of Don's Party. By many standards the characters in the play are an extremely unattractive lot, and yet they seem to be treated very affectionately. The play partly satirises their foibles and partly celebrates their liveliness and humanity. The answer to this apparent contradiction may lie in an age-old theory that all comedy is based on pain. If the person slipping on the banana skin is an intimate friend you don't laugh, you rush sympathetically to help them. Laughter comes when you feel in some way distant from or superior to the misfortune—but the greater, the original misfortune the greater the comedy. One fine achievement of Don's Party is to enable us to feel emotionally involved and comically distant by turns. Thus, to quote H.G. Kippax again: 'You laugh because the alternative would be embarrassing in a public place.'