How does David Williamson achieve this subtle alternation between humour and sympathy? How does he give to such a carefully arranged selection of details the appearance of a loose, chaotic party? The play is carefully structured and contrived to give the appearance of something uncontrived and natural. It has no plot, in the sense of a developing story with a beginning, an increasingly exciting or intriguing middle, developing to a climax and denouément. Rather, it has an emotional pattern which governs the action.

That pattern is one of raised expectations and hopes and subsequent disillusionment. This is obviously the broad pattern of the play as a whole—with the hopes for a Labor victory dashed when the DLP preferences start to come in. It is the pattern of the lives revealed of the characters—with their ambitious hopes for happiness or professional satisfaction turning sour as they settle into drab suburban lives. The pattern is also repeated in little incidents throughout the play. The attempted seductions are all thwarted (or, when they get as far as the bedroom, embarrassingly interrupted). The carefully prepared food for the party is thrown on the floor, or disparaged. We never even hear the punch-line to the promising duck-hunting joke. The mood of the play is encapsulated in the neat little image which rounds it off. Don starts to light a cigarette, pauses to ponder (over the events of the evening, or over the events of his life?) and the match burns his fingers.

All this could he material for a very gloomy play indeed, and many people do find it depressing. The gloom is relieved, however, by the sympathy for the characters in their disillusionment, and, above all, by the humour.

In the theatre Don's Party is one of the funniest Australian plays ever. A lot of the comedy is clear in reading it: the gags ('What's he got that I haven't got?' 'The nod.') and the comic set-pieces such as the duck-hunting story (p. 19) or the farcical bedroom scenes. A lot of the humour, however, is based on character. Each of the characters is given some comic obsession or foible which gives the actor a great deal with which to build a rich comic performance. There is Jody's disarming frankness, Mal's obsession with cracking-on, Mack's obsession with his kinkiness, Simon's simple desire to spend the evening discussing Buñuel films and Kerry's preoccupation with 'meaningful', 'organic' relationships. The most obvious example, of course, is Cooley, whose open, single-minded obsession with what might be called life's fundamentals (imbibing, excreting and fornicating) is the source of a great deal of the play's fun.

All of these comic obsessions are very real to the characters concerned, and very serious. Different people reading or seeing the play will find them funny in different degrees - according to the extent to which they identify with the characters and the extent to which they feel distant and objective. It is possible to imagine two very different productions: one which played the action purely for laughs and one which lingered over the more poignant moments where the emotions are on the surface. Probably the most satisfying production would be one in which these two elements in the play were kept in balance—allowing us to laugh and cry at the same time.

Don's Party probably did more than any other play to establish the 'new wave' of Australian drama of the early 1970s (except perhaps for another Williamson play, The Removalists). The extracts from the press reviews, in the next section, illustrate its successful stage history. It began as a little, experimental production at Melbourne's Pram Factory theatre in 1971. It went to another little theatre in Sydney in 1972, the Jane Street Theatre; transferred in the same production to the larger Parade Theatre and then to a commercial venue and an extensive tour (including a tour of the Sydney production in 1973 back to Melbourne where it all began). In 1975 it opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

The reviews illustrate how, in spite of the general enthusiasm for the play, the critics were divided about it. The fact that they disagree about its vulgarity—some finding it exhilarating and others finding it objectionable—may simply be a sign of their personal moral attitudes. But their disagreement about the author's compassion for his characters, or lack of it, may indicate something deeper about the play itself. In any case Don's Party will certainly become one of the classics of Australian comedy, and a source of great pleasure to audiences and to all who study it.