Speaker 1: David had a pretty good He was working in a
Speaker 1: great university. His students loved him, his peers loved him.
Speaker 1: He had plenty of friends who loved him, and then
Speaker 1: he became a successful playwright. Life couldn't get any better
Speaker 1: except reaching the dizzying heights David reached in the theater
Speaker 1: world didn't come cheap. For most of his life, he
Speaker 1: was like anyone else. You might have the occasional tiff
Speaker 1: with a coworker or acquaintance, but generally you're well liked
Speaker 1: by the people you care about. And all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: hordes of strangers started to hate David Williamson. Already a
Speaker 1: self conscious man, the idea of people making a living
Speaker 1: by tearing apart his every thought was almost debilitating for David.
Speaker 1: So how did he learn to train his focus onto
Speaker 1: the audience rather than the critics. My name is doctor
Speaker 1: Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of
Speaker 1: behavioral science consultancy Inventium, And this is how I work,
Speaker 1: a show about how to help you do your best work.
Speaker 1: On Today is my favorite Tip episode. We go back
Speaker 1: to an interview from the past and I pick out
Speaker 1: my favorite tip from that interview In today's show, I
Speaker 1: speak with playwrights David Williamson, and I wanted to know,
Speaker 1: on the very first preview night of a show, when
Speaker 1: there's a packed house with people watching his words being
Speaker 1: spoken for the first time, what sorts of things he
Speaker 1: looks for in his audience to see what he might
Speaker 1: need to change.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm looking for involvement. I'm hoping the audience is
Speaker 2: absorbed in the story. I hope it's relating to their lives,
Speaker 2: because the thing I used to love was writing plays
Speaker 2: that impinged on the sorts of lives or reflective sorts
Speaker 2: of lives that those people were having. Now I've often
Speaker 2: been criticized because my players are about the Anglo Celtic
Speaker 2: middle class, and there are only one segment of our society.
Speaker 2: But it's a segment I know, and there's a lot
Speaker 2: of us, and we should be and we should be
Speaker 2: allowed to have our own stories. And the proliferation of
Speaker 2: writing from other groups in society has been very welcome.
Speaker 2: But that's what I know, and that's what I do.
Speaker 2: And when I heard that audience, usually fairly middle class
Speaker 2: and Anglo Celtic reacting to it and saying wow, I
Speaker 2: know someone like that. I really know someone like that,
Speaker 2: and I've seen that happen. You can see them when
Speaker 2: you can sense them saying that. That's when it's deeply satisfying.
Speaker 1: And would you talk to audience members during interval or
Speaker 1: at the end.
Speaker 2: No, I'd be terrified. I'd leave Kristin. She'd do it.
Speaker 2: Survey from the women's lou and shit, hear the buzz
Speaker 2: in there and come back. I'm terribly self conscious on
Speaker 2: when I'm in an audience. I'm often accused of laughing
Speaker 2: at my own work. They look at me like, oh,
Speaker 2: I's laughing at its own work. Well, I'm usually laughing
Speaker 2: at the creativity that clever actors have brought to my lines,
Speaker 2: rather than celebrating my lines. But it's hard to tell
Speaker 2: them that. No, I'm terribly self conscious. There was a
Speaker 2: time when I couldn't go to opening nights. I'd have
Speaker 2: to send Kristin off and get a report back. It's
Speaker 2: very tense, very tense.
Speaker 1: Now. I imagine when reviews start coming out, that is an
Speaker 1: interesting time. I'd love to know. How how do you
Speaker 1: deal with bad reviews, negative reviews.
Speaker 2: Well, earlier in the career I didn't deal very well
Speaker 2: at all. The first law of criticism I learned, much
Speaker 2: to my chagrin, was that the strength of the audience
Speaker 2: reaction bears no relation to the critics evaluation of the play.
Speaker 2: In fact, sometimes it works in reverse. I remember one
Speaker 2: critic writing, I sat with a black cloud above me
Speaker 2: as people fell about around me, laughing, as if this
Speaker 2: is a terrible crime that I'd written something that people
Speaker 2: were enjoying. But a lot of theater critics think that
Speaker 2: theater is an arena of suffering that you've got to
Speaker 2: be if you're Anglo Celtic middle class, you've got to
Speaker 2: be whipped and told your horrible species that are doing
Speaker 2: terrible things to the planet and other people, and you've
Speaker 2: got to be told how bad you are. You're not
Speaker 2: allowed al off and enjoy the theater. It's a place
Speaker 2: of torture, according to some critics. But no, so I didn't.
Speaker 2: I particularly reacted badly when I knew I'd written a
Speaker 2: hit and got no recognition for it whatsoever. In fact,
Speaker 2: got slammed for it, being told I was commercial, and
Speaker 2: I knew that my players were players of substance. Sure,
Speaker 2: they are entertaining unless you make a play entertaining. On
Speaker 2: the surface, you won't get an audience, there's no sense
Speaker 2: doing it. But at other levels they were making fairly
Speaker 2: often fairly acute observations about the patterns of our social
Speaker 2: behavior that were often quite intricate. And I knew my
Speaker 2: work wasn't meretricious. It was actually something of substance and
Speaker 2: so to be because people were in enjoying it. To
Speaker 2: be told it was worthless was a hard pill to swallow.
Speaker 2: But then again, the human psyche is somehow structured to
Speaker 2: concentrate ferociously on all the negative and set aside the positive.
Speaker 2: And there are a lot of positive things being said
Speaker 2: about me, But the human ego, being as it is,
Speaker 2: you tend to think, well, of course that's right, Yes,
Speaker 2: of course I'm brilliant, But what's this bastard calling me?
Speaker 2: So you obsess about the bad stuff and forget the
Speaker 2: good stuff. And it reminded me of Dostoevski, that one
Speaker 2: of the greatest novelists ever, who had his life blighted
Speaker 2: by one persistent, awful critic in the Ukraine that kept
Speaker 2: giving him a rough time and it evirtually ruined his life.
Speaker 2: So I was a bit like that. But I got
Speaker 2: better but start. When I became prominent, it was a
Speaker 2: psychic shock because until that stage I was a lecturer
Speaker 2: and a tershie institution where students like me, the staff
Speaker 2: like me, my friends seem to like me. I was affable,
Speaker 2: nobody hated me. And then suddenly you have become prominent
Speaker 2: and you realize the arts is the most ferociously competitive
Speaker 2: field on the face of the earth. Everyone wants to
Speaker 2: be a writer or an artist or something like that.
Speaker 2: So if you succeed, the ones that haven't succeeded have
Speaker 2: really got it in for you.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed my chat with David, and if
Speaker 1: you want to listen to the full interview, you can
Speaker 1: click on a link to the episode in the show notes.
Speaker 1: If you're looking for more tips to improve the way
Speaker 1: that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that
Speaker 1: contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me
Speaker 1: work better, which range from interesting research finding, street of
Speaker 1: gadgets and software that I'm loving. You can sign up
Speaker 1: for that at Howiwork dot co. That's how I Work
Speaker 1: dot Co. How I Work is produced by Inventium with
Speaker 1: production support from dead Set Studios, and thank you to
Speaker 1: Martin Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode
Speaker 1: and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise.
Speaker 1: See you next time.