Travelling North by David Williamson

First published: 1980

First produced: 1979, at the Nimrod Theatre, Sydney, Australia

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1969-1972

Locale: Australia

Principal Characters:

• Frances, a woman aged about fifty-five
• Frank, a man of seventy, Frances’s lover
• Sophie, and
• Helen, Frances’s daughters
• Saul Morgenstein, a doctor
• Freddy Wicks, a neighbor of Frank and Frances

The Play

Act 1 of Travelling North consists of thirteen scenes, act 2 of twenty scenes. The fluid action moves between Melbourne in the southern part of Australia and a tropical area on the Queensland coast, two thousand miles north. Through its use of cinemalike devices, the action not only covers a wide landscape but also probes deeply into varied emotional territories.

The plot revolves around Frances, a woman in her mid-fifties, who falls in love with Frank, a rather dashing seventy-year-old widower. Frances, a survivor of the Depression during the 1930’s and a broken marriage, considers her life a failure, believing that she neither gave her two daughters a good home nor fulfilled her own expectations. So when Frank offers romance amid the eternal sunshine of northern Australia’s coast, she sets out to claim the happiness that has so long eluded her and for which she has not many years left to seek.

Frank, though, proves to be a difficult man: He is opinionated, authoritative, and demanding. Before long, as her daughters had predicted, he becomes ill, and Frances finds herself acting as a nurse to a crotchety old man obsessed with physical symptoms and medications. In scenes played against a warm, tropical splendor, Frank refuses to accept the truth of his physical degeneration and the chilling reality of his oncoming death. Although trapped in a relationship that has withered, Frances refuses to shirk what she sees as her responsibilities to Frank, an attitude arising from the guilt she still harbors over having failed her daughters when they were young.

The aging lovers’ children also figure in the play’s action and provide resonance for the hollow lives of their parents. Both of Frances’s daughters live in Melbourne and are ostensibly well settled in good homes with successful husbands and happy children. They have benefited from richer days in Australia, following World War II, when more opportunities and a better life became attainable. In spite of the outward changes, though, neither daughter has found much happiness or security, and both draw on their mother for an emotional sustenance that she does not have to give. Frank, on the other hand, is alienated from his son, whom he has not seen for years, and he enjoys only a surface relationship with his daughter. At one point the bitterness the daughter holds over the way Frank treated her mother disrupts the fragile cordiality of their relations.

Set out so factually, the action of the play might call to mind a soap opera. However, such is hardly the case, for each of the numerous scenes—necessarily economical in their development—points up persistent truths about relationships between parent and child, truths about love and living and dying, about unfulfilled ambition and lost dreams. In addition, even though the events cover but two years, the entire lives of the major characters unfold through the dialogue.

The play ends on an indefinite note. The lives of Frances’s daughters have worsened: Helen’s husband has left her for another woman, and Sophie, who has finally completed her degree, is bitter over a stunted career. Frank has not reunited with his son, nor has he deepened the relationship with his daughter. Then, shortly after Frank and Frances finally get married, Frank dies. According to his directions, the mourners set aside tears, flowers, priests, piety, and headstones for a full magnum of champagne, which they drink while the dead Frank looms in the background. Asked by Frank’s doctor and a neighbor what she plans to do, Frances says that she will not return to her family in the southern part of Australia but will go farther north.

Considering that David Williamson uses such an ordinary framework on which to construct a play that deals with issues so large, the work’s lack of sentimentality and triteness are especially admirable. It is saved in part from these pitfalls by comedy and satire; the recognizability of its situations also guarantees audience interest. The plot of Travelling North gives shape to the triviality of living, then questions what meaning emerges from the myriad ordinary moments that constitute an individual’s life.

Dramatic Devices

Although Travelling North is realistic in its presentation of characters, dialogue, and action, the play still has a fragmented air. This quality stems from the short scenes—some of them only a few moments long—that fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Intended to be produced without breaks between the scenes, the play employs a unit setting so that the action can flow from one part of the stage to another. Simple but exact decor and furnishings suggest the locale, whether it be a cottage in Queensland or a home in Melbourne. Lighting plays an important part as well, especially in the exterior scenes. For example, stage directions for the tropical scenes require an “atmosphere” that is “warm and tropical” or full of “light and brightness,” whereas those set in the harsher climate of Melbourne are directed to carry a “cold and wintry” atmosphere. At another point, the stage directions say, “We know immediately we are near the tropics by the changes in lighting and scenery.”

Like the scenery and lighting, sound effects—especially music—serve as an integral part of the play’s overall development. The script calls specifically for the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Vivaldi, Franz Schubert, and so on; not simply pretty sounds in the background, the music underscores the characters’ emotions and adds subtly to the overall thematic intent.

In addition to utilizing fully the stage’s technical possibilities, Williamson shows once again in Travelling North his keen sense of dialogue, scene building, and character development. The characters’ speech is often witty, always natural, and consistently appropriate. Each scene, even the very short ones, builds to a climax and connects the previous bit of human experience to the next fragment, so that the action heads almost breathlessly toward its denouement. While the characters do not seem to be given much time to establish their identity, they manage to do so through the concentrated dialogue and responses allowed them, no matter how brief their appearance in a particular situation.

The dramatic technique of Travelling North is rich and varied, making full use of both the technical and literary devices available to the playwright. As is the case with any good play, Travelling North gains its highest expression when performed and all the effects blend together. The play has been turned into a successful film, for which David Williamson wrote the script. Although able to create the all-important atmosphere more easily, the film lacks the sheer originality of the stage production with its mosaic effect. The adaptation of film technique to the stage lends Travelling North a special quality that can be realized only through the magic of the living theater. There all the fragments meld together to explore what it means to “go travelling further north.”

Critical Context

David Williamson is first and foremost an Australian dramatist who, as he himself said about his work, records the life of his particular “tribe,” which happens to be ordinary, modern, urban Australians. However, as Williamson noted in an interview, the best of that “tribal writing” transcends the particular tribe and becomes universal. To an extent, Travelling North does so more effectively than some of Williamson’s other plays, which often depend on the Australian context so fully that they at times remain somewhat inaccessible to audiences abroad.

Travelling North also marks a change in Williamson’s dramatic technique. In the past his work reflected the dictates of the well-made play, the action unfolding through fully developed scenes played out in a single set, rather than through fragments moving back and forth in a variety of locales. This technique, with which he experimented so successfully in Travelling North, he puts to use as well in his next two plays, The Perfectionist (pr. 1982) and Emerald City (pr. 1987). Williamson rounded out the twentieth century with a number of well-received plays, including Money and Friends (pr., pb. 1992), Brilliant Lies (pr., pb. 1993), Dead White Males (pr., pb. 1995), and Corporate Vibes (pr., pb. 1999).

Critics have noted that Travelling North is Williamson’s most “religious” play in that it addresses matters far more spiritual than a particular tribe’s social and political affairs. While an earlier work such as Don’s Party (pr. 1971) concerns itself with social mores and inherently Australian political matters, Travelling North looks at life more fully, examines emotions and relationships more deeply, and tackles questions that are in no way peculiarly Australian but that are posed by all members of the human tribe.

Sources for Further Study

Fitzpatrick, Peter. Williamson. North Ryde, Australia: Methuen, 1987.

Kiernan, Brian. “Comic-Satiric-Realism: David Williamson’s Plays Since The Department.” Southerly 46 (March, 1986): 3-18.

Kiernan, Brian. David Williamson: A Writer’s Career. Sydney, Australia: Currency, 1996.

McCallum, John. “A New Map of Australia: The Plays of David Williamson.” Australian Literary Studies 11 (May, 1984): 342-354.

Moe, Christian H. “David Williamson.” In Contemporary Dramatists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1999.

Parsons, Philip. “This World and the Next.” London Magazine 20 (August/September, 1980): 121-126.