Leonard Radic on the premiere production by the Australian Performing Group at the Pram Factory, Melbourne , The Age, 16 August 1971
Williamson's interest is in middle-class mores and values. Specifically he is interested in the educated members of that class—not those fresh out of university but some ten years after, when their ideals, like their marriages, have begun to crumble, when boredom has set in and all are looking for ways to renew their flagging zest...

The party begins quietly, as such parties do, with exchanges of niceties, anecdotes and jokes. But as the wine and beer flow, the pace quickens and the characters begin to reveal themselves along with their hang-ups and repressions...

The weakness of the play (two hours without an interval) is partly that it lacks a real climax, and partly that it stops short at the point of demonstration. This is slice-of-life drama; what is missing is an overall vision of the characters portrayed.

They are neither comic nor tragic, though they have possibilities for being both. Nor are they conceived in the spirit of satire. Williamson is content to depict them naturalistically, and to skirt the deeper issues that their behaviour raises.

H.G. Kippax on the Jane Street Theatre production, Sydney, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 July 1972
On the strength of Don's Party... first staged in Melbourne, and rewritten for Jane Street, I have no doubt that Mr Williamson is the best playwright working in Australia, and one of the best in the world...

First, a warning—and I mean this. This is NOT for the squeamish... It has, continuously, more four-letter words, etc. than any play I know. It has long, very explicit passages of talk about sex, sexual organs, perversion, excretion—and politics. (The DLP will hate it.)

In my opinion (and I don't like dirt as a rule) its dirt is entirely defensible. It is, so to speak, real dirt, fresh from the last drunken rort in the patio culture. Few people, even the would-be intellectuals like Mr Williamson's gaggle... can dish it out with the sustained virtuosity of this play. And few parties get quite as rough as Don's.

But there isn't a line, and not a character, that hasn't the ring—just off-key—of one part of Australia, larger than life.

The dirt is defensible, in the second place, because it is Mr Williamson's running metaphor for violence—not the overt physical violence of The Removalists but the inner festering violence of failed, frustrated, unhappy people. It is defensible, finally, because it is very, very funny.

Katharine Brisbane on the Jane Street production, The Australian, 6 July 1972
Unlike most of his contemporaries [Williamson] is not a satirist but writes with an almost unshockable compassion. This motley group of people at the watershed of middle-age have an inevitability and, not a defeat but a reconciliation to age which the older cast at Jane Street understands. The voting counts, which crackle from the television throughout the evening, capture in a single image the author's compassionate view of these friends: he shares with them their hopes, their fiery facade, their faded radicalism. None of us can alter the passage of time and we all know that the Labor Party did not win the 1969 election.

Nothing really happens at Don's party. On the surface it is a party like any other. In fact the action is full of shocks; the comedy is a gag a line.

But the sheer joy of the play lies in the people themselves: familiar, funny and real.

Kevon Kemp on the Jane Street production, National Times, 10-15 July 1972
On almost every level of theatre Don's Party is superbly effective. It is bold in form, for it forgoes almost any formal structure at all, beyond basic unity of time and place. The play simply organises itself around the actions of its characters.

Don's Party is, in origin, one of the author's own parties... and the neatly selective cast comprises a bunch of left-wing, successful graduates with a respectable accountant and wife thrown in for kicks, as it were.

Remorselessly and brilliantly the play lifts up all those ticky-tacky houses on the hillside that these people have pulled over themselves. The superior pond life thus exposed is paraded in front of us with enormously rich and Rabelaisian comic flair...

On stage any amount of coarseness can be justified; whereas vulgarity—actions and words out of tune with the situation or character, and inserted only for shock—is right out of court. Williamson's play is filled with honest coarseness. The characters have just their right coarseness. Their vocabulary thus flows inevitably, and with its own strange beauty of diction...

All of them talk, many of them with great openness and honesty, and in their talking the playwright shows us a marvellously releasing vision of what we and such people are. If any pity is established, it is by these humans themselves, their touching humanity, their liability to sustain hurt.

I don't think Williamson has any special compassion about it all. Here they are, objective specimens of this current Australian society. Society is his target. He is saying—underneath all the gigantic laughter at his players' strip-show—what an extraordinary new world this is that has such people in it.

Julitha Dent on the Jane Street production, The Review, 15-21 July 1972
Don's juice-freak wife-swapping party is one of those sham celebrations that you may not have been lucky enough to avoid five years ago, running the full gamut of social stereotypes, pseudointellectual, nymphomaniac Lonely Heart Club Band little liberals and the like—the new breed of university-educated Alfs, for the taste of whom this play might well have been written.

That bourgeois life has been reduced to an increasing obsession with the urbane and banal is no justification for dragging theatre down with it. Blurted images of people bound in fragmented linguistic and social patterns have become the accepted modern dramatic idiom...

We cannot possibly deceive ourselves that because we are now producing material acceptable to the Royal Court, that Australian drama has arrived, or as Kippax ( SMH) asserts, 'we have an Australian drama, and it's doing very nicely thank you' with inflections of provincial pride; and further, that Mr Williamson 'is one of the best [playwrights] in the world' - of this already dead but unfortunately not yet forgotten genre ...

This particular play was approached in the well-tried traditional manner, nothing about it spectacularly good or bad: just enough generic candour to leave one cold.

While some waste their time arguing the defensibility of its dirt, must we be content to be subjected to this continual rehashing of idioms of the Fifties instead of trying to raise drama out of this rut of irrelevance, so that one can go to a play without coming away totally unmoved, muttering 'not again, not again!'

We could all go to a better (or worse) party any night of the week. If we could be bothered.

Brian Hoad on the transfer from Jane Street to the Old Tote Company's Parade Theatre, Sydney, Bulletin, 30 September 1972
But with David Williamson's Don's Party the cruelties of the overexuberant beginnings [of Australian drama in the late Sixties] are passing. The basic ingredients are the same. All the flaws of Australian life are present and correct. Yet they are viewed through the cool, clear, quizzical eyes of a born humorist who is too intrigued with life as it is to want to change it. So out goes the bitterness, the didacticism, the cynicism and the pretence, and in comes the warmth of humanity...

In many ways it is the world of Chekhov—a play about states of mind, about the moods beneath the words. The eleven characters have more or less equal parts to play, more or less equal claims on the audience's attention; it is the complex interaction of the many voices which creates the play, which is a play not about action but about the emotional accompaniment to action.

Like Chekhov it makes no demands on you. It is offering no particular line in moral or human values. You can take it lightly and superficially if you like... ; or you can enjoy it as a moody drama of inaction... ; or you can see it as the purest form of comedy—that which lies on the other side of tragedy. Whichever way you look at it, it cannot fail to warm the heart.

Don's Party is rooted in parochialism (as Chekhov was), but because it is dealing with people beneath the skin it is filled with more universal insights (as Chekhov again). Perhaps, too, the same sort of insights; perhaps something in common between two societies apparently so separated in space and time.

Margaret Smith on the Parade Theatre season, Nation Review, 11-17 November 1972
Don's Party seems to be demythologising our society of any sense of greatness. The social criticism of the play presents a mainstream society that is particularly mediocre. People have their ups and downs and have the ability to be resilient. According to this critique Australians do not have their great heights of joys and their great tragedies. They just flow along oscillating between ups and downs in a great stream of mediocrity. But perhaps this is sadder than a great tragedy, because it seems to suggest that Australians deny themselves real feeling and experience in life - they just take it as it comes and 'give it a go'.

David Thorpe in Melbourne on the national tour of the Sydney production, Nation Review, 11-17 May 1973
Behind its magnificent bawdiness and gross humors, its earthy language and drunken sexuality, Don's Party is a serious study of suburban Australia. It concerns the eroded and tarnished idealism of left-wing intellectuals caught in the mesh of a materialist society. It is a study of failure. Its poignancy stems from the desperate attempts of the characters to maintain a pose of progressiveness in a framework of mateship against all the overwhelming trivia of middle-class suburban life—children, school bills, mortgages... the lot.

Ken Healey, Canberra Times, 23 August 1973
Last night in the Canberra Theatre on its return to Canberra Don's Party demonstrated that high comedy and great tragedy share a basic element: the failure to realise in achievement some of our basic needs.

David Williamson builds good comedy on the basis of an infallible ear for the Oz vernacular, and creates superb theatre by orchestrating his dialogue from elements that trip from the tongues of likeable fits and misfits.

Tragic heroes are not a likeable lot. One may shrink from Lear, feel humbly wretched at the sight of Oedipus, even become protective toward Hamlet. But in the company of Kath, Mal, Mack, Jenny and the rest of Don's guests, one's reaction is what would be called compassion if it were possible to remain objective enough to use such dispassionate language... Without pretending to advance our understanding of Man or Humanity, spelt with capital letters, Don's Party holds up a wickedly articulate mirror against the flight of enamel geese on the wall of an Australian house. At a second glance it is not recognisably my own house, nor exactly yours. But I have seen most of those people at your parties. I distinctly disliked most of them then. At Don's party I recognised warmth and resilience in them which I had never noticed before.

Malcolm Pettigrove on the Old Tote's second company tour, Canberra Times, 30 August 1974
There is an undeniable Australianness about Don's Party. It is set in a Melbourne suburb on the night of the 1969 Federal elections. The election is the nominal pretext for the party. Beer is the party's medium. Ego-tripping is the party's principal game. Indifference to politics is the party's basic truth. The situation is a familiar one, and as a launching pad for all kinds of social, psychological or political investigations it could hardly be more promising. Unfortunately its possibilities are never realised. Ignition point is reached between some of the characters, but nothing of significance ever takes off.

How can it? The language and lifestyle of the characters at the party is too severely and depressingly limited, and their concern is only for themselves.

Most of us have met a Mack and a Cooley, and have shared such exchanges as:

COOLEY: Shitting, shagging, shaving. Same old routine.
MACK: Life gets a bit monotonous, doesn't it?

But most of us have met a far wider range of intellects and imaginations than Mack and Cooley represent. Even at the same party. Unfortunately we seldom move beyond Mack and Cooley's circle while we are in Williamson's company.

At times, Williamson records their language and life style so faithfully that it is difficult to tell whether he is writing a satire or a celebration of it. If his purpose is objectively to depict it, without criticism or praise, the occasional hints of satire and celebration make it difficult to tell whether or not he has succeeded.

B.A. Young on the Royal Court Theatre production, directed by Michael Blakemore, Financial Times (London), 6 March 1975
No doubt Mr Williamson is exposing the weakness of contemporary Australian society... but it is not enough, surely, to train a searchlight on it without some further dramatic purpose.

Should we not be given some idea why Australian middle-class society has turned out like this? Mr Williamson offers us no reason on earth for a bunch of tolerably prosperous, tolerably well-educated young people to act like savages.

[B.A. Young also said that the play was yet another demonstration that Australia need take no further steps to reduce immigration, since no decent person could possibly want to live there.]

John Elsom, The Listener ( London), 13 March 1975
As the results drool in, the party turns cold. The women chat about the sexual performances of the men with loveless accuracy. The men, huddled by the bar, praise and punch each other. Simply as a technical feat, Don's Party is an exceptional play. It is very funny as a farce, with crisp dialogue, precise timing, clear but not grotesque characterisation, and that neat dovetailing of themes which looks casual but requires great craftsmanship. The jokes also fulfil two of the criteria described by Trevor Griffiths in Comedians, of illuminating social behaviour and prompting the desire for change. The climax of the play is not of a type associated with farce. The women just sit in an icy circle, watching their two aging campus heroes, Don and Mal, drunk and sparring, matey and brutal, rough-and-tumbling in sad adult puppydom. This scene belongs to moral comedy, deeply felt and accurate. The pulpy flesh of polite habits has been chewed away, until we are left with some brown and fly-blown cores. The Australian setting takes some pain away for British audiences, but the suspicion remains that these cores, if bandaged by different accents, might emerge as one's best friends—even (a horrible thought)—oneself.