AT the beginning of David Williamson's play Don's Party, the loutish Don is crouched in front of a television set, trying to adjust the vertical hold. It's 1969, election night, Gough Whitlam's first, unsuccessful, tilt at unseating the Coalition, and the election coverage runs in the background throughout the several hours of the play.

Jacinta Stapleton in the STC production of Don's Party. David Williamson's early plays have become classics.

AT the beginning of David Williamson's play Don's Party, the loutish Don is crouched in front of a television set, trying to adjust the vertical hold. It's 1969, election night, Gough Whitlam's first, unsuccessful, tilt at unseating the Coalition, and the election coverage runs in the background throughout the several hours of the play.

Although TVs today are more hi-tech, election night coverage has hardly evolved, gimmicky electronic display devices aside. And it's because some of the scenario covered in Don's Party also hasn't changed that a couple of state theatre companies have felt confident the time is right for a revival of the 1971 play. Long-running, seemingly immovable conservative government: check. Social mood signalling desire for grassroots change: check. Middle-class, seethingly angry lefties with their hopes raised by a new-broom Labor leader and optimistic polls: check. An Australia of self-congratulatory male ribaldry and thinly veiled vicious misogyny: checkmate.

All the commentaries on Don's Party and its various incarnations since the original production, directed by Graeme Blundell at the Pram Factory in Melbourne in 1971, say the play is not about politics.

But Peter Evans, who directed it for Melbourne Theatre Company's season opener this year and who is taking it to Sydney, says the neat parallel of the play's political backdrop and that of 2007 is one good reason to revive it.

It also has become de rigueur to point out, when early Williamson shows are revived by the subscriber-conscious state theatre companies, that Williamson's retirement in 2005 from mainstage playwriting created a gaping hole in the repertoire. From the heady days of The Removalists (1971), Don's Party, The Department (1975), The Club (1977), Travelling North (1979) and so on through to Amigos (2004) and Influence (2005), audiences have always rewarded Williamson and the theatre companies by turning up in solid numbers.

Now, Evans says, history is repeating itself as the Williamson oeuvre ages into classic status. While reviewers these days may call Don's Party quaint rather than shocking, it's still a relatively easy sell at the box office. The humour, he says, has become more accessible, not less. Audiences can shudder at the way we were rather than feel that Williamson's depiction of bitter women and boorish men is a little too close to damaging national pride for comfort.

The question for producers, then, is whether to underline the period details of the 1970s plays. Slowly but surely, a related question is forming: is it possible to update early Williamson or, 30 years on, have these plays become period pieces that rely heavily on nostalgia?

So popular is the idea of a Williamson revival that HIT Productions has launched a 32-week national tour of The Club to a staggering 74 venues. Following its short season at the Athenaeum in Melbourne, the play zooms across country Victoria, heads to Queensland as far north as Proserpine in September and October, tracks back down the east coast before diverting across to Adelaide in November, then farther west in December, and so on, wending its expletive-filled way across this vast country until its finale at the Pilbeam Theatre, Rockhampton, Queensland, in May next year.

Bruce Myles, who is directing The Club, teaming up again with actor John Wood, says he chooses to go easy on the period elements of the play, set in a Melbourne football club in the days when players were mostly amateurs and the blokes who ran the place used shonky business connections to get their own way, on and off the field. (And yes, recent AFL boardroom shenanigans suggest at least that part of the club culture has not essentially changed.)

"We've left the play in its time, but I get uncomfortable when plays from the period become fashion statements, with exaggerated styles," Myles says. "We've been conservative and pushed back on the references to the '70s, but I've never felt the need to adjust the play for contemporary audiences."

Myles says he did wonder, when he first went to direct a revival of The Club in the '90s, whether it would "still have legs". He remembers how phenomenally successful it was, when its stridency, its vulgarity and its aggression knocked audiences back in their seats. Now, the biggest problem for a director is controlling the audience's laughter so the play doesn't degenerate into slapstick and farce.

"This one is almost like a Restoration comedy, the structure is so precise, with each scene clearly defined by the key element from the narrative," Myles says of The Club. "There's a lot of room to move in terms of sketching out the characters. What I think we've never really understood strongly enough here (in Australia) is that writers like Williamson are strong stylists, in the same way that (Harold) Pinter or Noel Coward are stylists, to be played in a certain way. We've tended to consider the plays in terms of the pervading naturalism, but most of them have individual style, and you have to strip away everything in the production to get to that style."

Myles says directors get into trouble with Williamson's plays when they simply "pinch the outer skin" of the characters, allowing the surface caricature to drive the play, not the deeper dimensions of these loquacious, frustrated, smart-mouthed jokers who strut and fret on the depressingly narrow stage of their lives, only to be left at the end, like Don in Don's Party, burning their fingers and their ideals as another unsatisfactory day comes to a close.

Williamson may "take the piss" out of his characters, Myles says, but he loves them nevertheless, at least the suburban unsophisticates of the '70s plays. In later plays, when the characters became more worldly and even less likable, some of that warmth disappeared. Myles says that coincided with the playwright's increasing "anger and frustration with how our society was moving".

The director is surprised at how audiences today react to the scheming nastiness and sexist belligerence of the board and coach of the footy team in The Club.

"Jock says the most disgusting things about his relationship with his wife and his attitudes to women, and you cannot believe the roars of laughter from the audience. I think it's to do with how you warm to the character. If you are able to look at it and say: 'That guy is disgraceful,' you can afford to laugh."

And as for the particularity of this play -- its sports club setting with the sinister boardroom overshadowing everything -- Myles says it was proven to him that the depiction was spot-on when a woman told him about her experience as the girlfriend of one of the star players at just such a club. She was consistently aware of, and shocked by, the way "smart men of industry would come to the club, wipe their shoes at the door and leave their brains behind. Their behaviour was completely irrational."

Subtlety, Myles says, has never been Williamson's way: "It was strident, aggressive stuff. David doesn't come on with a feather." It was also important for an aspiring Williamson actor to learn to act with a beer in one hand.

Irrational behaviour from boofhead men in suits and much drinking of beer was, of course, mistaken for naturalism at the time, and thus began the long debate about the artistic worth of Williamson v his popular appeal.

Blundell remembers the days in Melbourne when The Removalists was playing at the tiny La Mama theatre, with Bruce Spence and Peter Cummins, and Williamson as the removalist whose comic refrain about his big petrol-guzzling rig ticking over in the driveway punctuated the increasingly violent and ultimately deadly progression of the play. Blundell, just down the road at the Pram Factory, was trying to unite an earnest group of idealistic actors who were debating the virtues of staging Don's Party.

"It was not experimental enough," Blundell recalls many of the group complaining. "It didn't push back the frontiers of drama and life; its political consciousness needed raising. It rehashed the idiom of the '50s rather than trying to raise drama out of its rut of irrelevance." It was also sordid and the women had rotten roles.

Blundell reported on the chaotic and unhappy progress of rehearsals to Williamson, who ranted, "Some of them obviously don't give a f--- if the show's shithouse so long as they feel politically fulfilled."

According to Evans, female actors now find Williamson's female roles satisfyingly meaty, which surprises them because that's not how they recall those parts. "(Don's Party) was controversial and the women's roles dismissed as underdeveloped," Evans says. "The men characters are useless, reactive, selfish and pathetic, and are revealed as such as the play goes on. Our experience has been, talking to people who had done the play in the past or seen it, that now, people find it funnier."

Evans is a graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Art and this is the first time he has directed a Williamson play, although he was assistant director on a production of Heretic a few years ago. He finds the early Williamson plays "cracking" and relishes the challenge to get the timing right, so that the production has the perfect balance of comedy and sobering sociological revelation.

"It's a simple play but very clever," he says. "When you get it right, where the stress lies, how the pause works, you mainline something in the audience and you get a good response."

The MTC-STC production of Don's Party does not attempt to take this particular election party out of its 1969 context, although the resonances are impossible to ignore. "We try to have our cake and to eat it too," Evans says, acknowledging that the timing of the Sydney season could not have been better, with an election announcement imminent.

But first and foremost, this is a revival of a "big Australian play", and audiences are enjoying nostalgic references such as TV's vertical hold, and the period costumes and hairstyles. When Blundell revived Don's Party in the '90s, with Steve Bisley and Hugo Weaving, it worked so well as a "time capsule piece", he came to believe it should become, along with Jack Hibberd's A Stretch of the Imagination, a permanent part of the leading companies' repertoire.

Evans believes there's also a timeless quality to the play and that's why it continues to connect with audiences. "It's a play about disillusionment, about midlife crisis, that leaves a bittersweet taste," he says.

HIT Productions' The Club is touring regional Australia, including Frankston, Victoria, and Penrith and Lismore, NSW. Don's Party is at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, September 14-October 27.