No room for neutrality

Watching the play Sanctuary could not be described as a comfortable experience. Invariably, Australia's leading playwright, David Williamson, manages to split his audiences straight down the middle over which of the play's two characters they hate the most. This is not a passing irritation. This is hatred with a passion.

This is also something that continues to surprise Williamson two years after writing Sanctuary and after scores of performances worldwide. 'I tried to write a balanced play showing deep flaws in both characters and how they have compromised,' he says. 'I have sympathy with both of them. It is very interesting that audiences always tend to take sides.' The play is set in the home-cum-sanctuary of a wealthy retired journalist, Robert 'Bob' King, who returned to Australia after a glittering career in the United States, in which he covered the world's major news stories as a television news anchorman and a correspondent with Time magazine.

King is interviewed by a young, idealistic student, John Alderston, who is working on a biography of King for his media studies thesis. This proves to be a highly critical investigation of King's career.

'Affluent businessmen tend to hate the little creep and moral zealot Alderston, and have complete sympathy with King,' Williamson says. 'Students see it very differently and despise King for having sold out.' This, for example, is how one Australian reviewer reacted: 'This young man [Alderston], with his pompous pronunciations on morality and his judgment of the life of a man he knows only from library files, irritated me beyond belief. He was so real.' Whereas, the great Australian journalist, John Pilger, a friend of Williamson's, has praised Sanctuary for being a useful lesson in how to read Western propaganda and said how clearly he recognises King.

'I have often seen him in places of war and human upheaval . . . he was the one who would speak privately in a voice respectful of truth and subversive of authority, yet in his professional life as a journalist, he would exude a dutiful sophistry in the service of a newspaper proprietor and all forms of conservative authority.' Surprisingly, for a play that says so much about the press, Williamson's initial inspiration came not from the media but from the desire to explore the interaction between two very different protagonists - a youthful idealist and a world-weary pragmatist.

'I was also very interested in the numbers of Australians who have become successful in the States and wanted to have one of these characters come back,' he says.