Essay About Sixth-Form Syllabuses And Form Of Popular Theatre

The Club
1976 some jeremiahs greeted the news
that Australias most popular playwright was
working on a play about football—Australias
most consuming form of popular theatre—with
mutterings about the dangers of sacrilege, or
of pandering to the public. But it didnt take
an expert to tip the success of The Club at the
box office. The degree of success has, however,
exceeded anyones expectations, even in
Melbourne, the football culture in which the play
is set. The Club, in its premiere season which
opened on 24 May 1977 at the Russell Street
Theatre, played to packed houses for an extended
four-month run, and brought unprecedented
profits to the Melbourne Theatre Company;
twenty months later it was back again, the laughs
and full houses showing no signs of flagging. Its
infiltration of the Rugby States was almost as
triumphant. The Nimrod Theatre production in
Sydney was scheduled for tours and subsequent
transfers to a larger theatre even before it
opened.
Within two years of its first production, The
Club appeared, in very distinguished company,
on sixth-form syllabuses in four Australian
States. That was a quite extraordinary mark
of the new respectability of Australian drama;
while its popularity and the relative politeness,
for a Williamson play, of its language, perhaps
recommend it to the people who devise the
syllabuses, someone up there is inviting us to
apply standards of success to The Club which are
not necessarily related to box offices.
David Williamson has a great capacity for
writing plays which a lot of people want to see.
This makes him a rare, and sometimes unfairly
disparaged, figure in contemporary Australian