Review of David Williamson: A Writer's Career, by Brian Kiernan

Abstract

For over twenty years David Williamson has provided the Australian stage with a succession of extremely successful comic plays and our film and television industries with scripts for many of their most acclaimed dramas: an extraordinary achievement in fact, whatever the debate may be about their aesthetic worth and endurance or intellectual profundity. Naturally then, as coeditor of a drama journal, I have been both genuinely keen to encourage good critical writing on Australia's 'best known and most popular' playwright (from the jacket blurb of Brian Kiernan's biography), and cynically aware that by doing so I could probably increase my subscriptions considerably. Williamson is a banking proposition; a public phenomenon that ensures his narratives, good and bad, will be noticed, reviewed, and viewed by more commentators and members of the non-arts community than those of any other contemporary Australian writer, including White, Keneally, Carey and Corris.