A
speech given by playwright David Williamson at
An Evening with The Alex Buzo
Company Advisory Board
in Sydney on
November 25 2008
When I look back on my life, many of the things that stand
out in my memory are those moments of sudden insight,
enchantment, revelation, elation, anger at social
injustice, amusement at the human folly, empathy at other’s
misfortunes, Aristotle’s “Pity and Terror”, and the sheer
wonder at being transported into another realm that have
been given to me by the creative imagination of artists. I
can’t claim these are the only moments of great note I’ve
experienced, as falling in love, being present at the birth
of one’s child, and watching the Sydney Swans win a grand
final in 2005 have been some of many other memorable
moments.
But it would be true to say that creative artists have
added a dimension to my life that has been hugely
meaningful and that I cannot imagine a life lived without
the possibility of those moments. As far back into the
history of the human species as we have been able to
travel, artistic expression, that attempt to harness the
latent creativity we are capable of, has been an endeavour
central to our lives.
The reason it is so central to humanity’s history, is,
because it is capable of delivering all those things I
spoke of earlier.
The arts in one sense are an experience outside of the
patterns of everyday life, and deliver experiences that are
often outside our everyday experiences, and yet the
experiences they do provide are deeply meaningful to all of
us. We hunger for the transportation out of ourselves that
great artists can give to us. We are given something that
we could never create for ourselves.
I wish I could write as well as Shakespeare, but even in my
most deluded moments of fantasy I know I can’t. If that son
of an obscure glover in Stratford on Avon hadn’t existed
how less rich would our experience and understanding of
life be? I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve been in
the theatre and had the hair stand up on the back of my
neck at the sheer wonder of that glover’s son’s verbal
magic. And if you think I’m laying it on with a trowel,
that I’m making too much of a good thing, that I’m gilding
the lily, that I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve, that I’m
leading you on a wild goose chase, that my ideas are dead
as a doornail, and that I’m in a pickle because I’ve not
remembered that brevity is the soul of wit, that what I’m
saying is all Greek to you, that I’m setting your teeth on
edge, that it beggars all description that I should expect
you to be in stitches, that it’s a foregone conclusion that
I should be sent packing, given short shrift, and that if
discretion was not the better part of valour, you’d get rid
of me in one fell swoop, and outside I could prattle on to
my heart’s content, before hopefully ending up sans teeth,
sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything, and vanishing into
thin air.
Then more fool you, as every one of those phrases including
that one, was invented by that extraordinary Shakespearean
mind – and that is just a fraction his legacy.
Such is the richness of the arts that everyone will have
different moments of revelation but I’d like to share a few
of mine.
When I had just turned sixteen and was hopefully going to
set the world ablaze as a great jazz trumpeter, I read of a
trumpeter called Miles Davis and ordered one of his first
albums, “round about midnight.” I can remember waiting and
waiting and finally it arrived. The impact was enormous. I
was literally hearing music that I couldn’t have dreamed
existed. Miles’s treatment of the old standard “Bye Bye
Blackbird” was exquisitely beautiful and as if that wasn’t
enough the great John Coltrane came roaring in on his tenor
sax, blasting sounds that I wouldn’t have dreamed possible.
I raced across to share the experience with my cousin,
until my uncle Col, a roof tiler, came in and ordered us to
“get that Chinese music off.” one person’s artistic high
point is not necessarily going to be universally shared.
Sadly, I knew as soon as I heard that record that I was
never going to be in that league and I started to reinvent
my future.
I can remember that wonderfully influential arts
enthusiast, Ken Tribe, asking me, when I was on the
Australia Council with him, if I liked chamber music.
Having heard so little up to then I wasn’t sure. He smiled
and gave me an LP of Schubert’s C Major Quintet. He told me
that six weeks after Schubert wrote it he died. As I
realised when I first played this extraordinarily rich
piece of music, the world was very lucky Schubert didn’t
die three months earlier than he did. I still get goose
bumps whenever I hear it.
I remember as a young man in my twenties going along to see
the Edward Albee play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, not
knowing what to expect. What I did experience was
profoundly riveting. The brutally honest savagery of this
wonderful piece of dramatic poetry, which took us into
lives ravaged by failed expectations, lost dreams, and
cancerous bitterness, but still underpinned by memories of
a love that still, faintly, endured. For the first time in
my life I saw the Freudian unconscious leap from the sub
text into the text. I suddenly saw what contemporary drama
could do in so expressively and frighteningly charting the
dark angels of our nature.
I remember going to see a film called “Through a Glass
Darkly,” by the Swedish writer/director Ingmar Bergmann. A
novelist watches the deterioration of his mentally ill
daughter with helpless pity but is full of guilt as his
artist’s fascination pushes him to use it in his writing. I
had never seen such searing and powerful honesty about the
ambivalence of our motives and the limits on our capacity
to empathise. Years later, travelling in Sweden, I asked a
group of young Swedes what they thought of his work. “We do
not like him in Sweden,” they said. “he is too morbid.”
I remember travelling in a black convertible down highway
one from San Francisco to LA, when my wife and I were both
outrageously young, and slipping a cassette into the
player. Of a Californian band we’d never heard before
called “The Eagles”, and then another band called “Credence
Clearwater Revival.” We both decided we were in exactly the
right place at the right time and doing the right thing,
and that this was the perfect music to be doing it by.
I remember finally catching up with George Eliot’s
“Middlemarch” in my early forties and being astounded at
the acute and ironic accuracy of her laser like
understanding of human psychology.
I remember, all too recently, going to my first Australian
Chamber Orchestra concert, and hearing Richard Tognetti’s
wonderfully vigorous interpretation of Beethoven’s Erotica
Symphony, performed with such drive and verve that it was
like hearing it for the first time.
There are many many others.
One of them was seeing a play of a young Australian
contemporary of mine, Alex Buzo, called “Rooted” and
literally being rooted to the spot as I watched Alex
capture the sad, joyless derivativeness of what passed for
social life in Australia in the sixties. And yet it was
hilarious at the same time. Like “Waiting for Godot”, the
most powerful presence, Simmo, was offstage and never
appeared. Simmo was the ultimate alpha male. The men
worshipped and were terrified of him in equal parts, and
the women dreamed that he would one day consent to donate
to them some of his supercharged sperm.
Somehow Alex had captured the regret of the ninety nine
percent of males who were not Simmos, and the senselessness
of our worship of such false macho cultural gods. The
latest of those gods “Warnie” is about to be deified in a
new musical which I’m sure will re address the concerns
that Alex alerted us to all those years ago.
It’s therefore a great honour for me to be here tonight
trying, in my own small way, to help Emma Buzo preserve and
expand the legacy of what her father achieved. Her program
is varied and ambitious and celebrates the arts as a whole
and her father in particular. For this we should be
grateful to her.
In fact we should be grateful to all the tireless and
underpaid workers in the arts whose hard work subsidizes
the enrichment of our cultural life. Of course they
shouldn’t have to subsidize it, but this is a country which
can cut the funding to one of the finest musical training
establishments in the world and never dare contemplate
shaving one cent of the bloated budget of hundreds of
millions given to the Australian Institute of Sport.
For some reason, people in general, and governments in
particular, have a habit of forgetting how enriching and
necessary the arts are to the texture of all our lives.
Emma is one of those brave souls who refuses to forget and
fights hard to get a level of recognition for Australian
artists and for the vital importance of creativity to the
Australian psyche.
As one of my characters in my play “Emerald City” said “We
must be allowed to tell our own stories or else we will
think that real life happens elsewhere and is spoken in
accents other than our own.”
Please be generous to her cause. She’s on the frontline of
a fight that’s vital to all of us.