On the opening night of Melbourne Theatre Company’s new production of David Williamson’s The Removalists, director Anne-Louise Sarks invited onto the stage five of the actors who had performed in the play’s original 1971 production: Kristin Williamson, Fay Byrne, Paul Hampton, Bruce Spence (who also directed), and David Williamson, who played the eponymous removalist. (Peter Cummins, who played the lead character of Simmonds, died in late 2024.)

For many of those who stood and applauded the original cast, it would have been a bittersweet moment. The original production of The Removalists was fostered by one of the stalwarts of independent theatre in Melbourne, Betty Burstall, and was performed before an audience of forty people at the nascent La Mama Theatre, a theatre that in 2025, for the first time in its long history, has been forced to go dark.

The struggles La Mama has faced in recent years to acquire the funding to keep its modest operations afloat is a story for another day (happily, a percentage of profits from this MTC production are being donated to La Mama). Nevertheless, The Removalists is a stark reminder of the generative power of small, independent theatres and their vital place in the Australian arts ecosystem. As Williamson himself noted in a 1974 Meanjin article, in the 1970s there was little to no interest among commercial and state-subsidised theatres to nurture Australian plays and playwriting. At La Mama, Williamson was given the chance to learn his craft by having his plays staged, not sent into the limbo of workshopping and dramaturgy that deadens the work of so many contemporary writers before it gets anywhere near a stage. What La Mama gave Williamson was a space to experiment, to make mistakes, and, crucially, to write plays that said precisely what he wanted them to say. When it emerged from the hotbed that is rough-and-ready independent theatre, The Removalists had a raw and visceral intensity that shocked its first audiences and made it the classic of Australian theatre that it remains today.

Dan Simmonds (Steve Mouzakis, all swagger and smirk) is sergeant at a police sub-branch in inner-city Melbourne. He likes to brag about his ability to avoid work: big complaints can be shunted off to the main branch, small complaints aren’t worth the bother. With the right sort of manipulation, Simmonds can keep his desk clean, filling his time with crosswords and an occasional midday movie. He is the sort of man who strides through life along the path of least resistance, throwing around just as much of his weight as will get him what he wants. Everything else can take care of itself, as long as it doesn’t get in his way.

William McKenna as Ross looking at Steve Mouzakis as Simmonds (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Simmonds’s cosy life is interrupted by the arrival of Neville Ross (a rosy-cheeked William McKenna, prim and neat in work shorts and long socks), a new constable straight out of training college. Simmonds has had new recruits before, but few have lasted long. Simmonds, who seems to have an instinct for his charges’ weak spots, immediately sets about dampening Ross’s enthusiasm, making sure the ‘boy’ knows who is boss. Simmonds probes Ross about his father’s job: Ross doesn’t want to tell him, but the domineering Simmonds eventually gets his way.

What Ross’s father does for a living is of no real interest to Simmonds. What Simmonds is interested in is information. What he knows, even more than what he does, gives Simmonds his leverage and allows him to establish himself at the top of any hierarchy. Of course, a bit of a whack now and then doesn’t go astray. But Simmonds knows how to throw a punch, priding himself on the fact that when he is forced to clout a bloke he leaves no bruises: ‘Whenever you hit a man … you should know exactly how hard you’re going to hit him a full minute before you land the blow.’

When two women come into the station wanting to lodge a complaint, Simmonds is immediately on the lookout for a way to avoid dealing with the paperwork. One of the women, Fiona (Eloise Mignon), has been beaten by her husband; her sister Kate (Jessica Clarke) wants the police to do something about it. Simmonds is more preoccupied with whether these women might, if he plays his cards right, provide an opportunity for him to ‘thread the eye of the old golden doughnut’.

The most chilling scene in this production comes when Simmonds insists on viewing Fiona’s bruises for himself, running his fingers across her back and her thighs, while she stands passively, suffering his gaze. Simmonds might be a man who objects to women being called ‘sluts’, but he is not too bothered about treating them as though they were exactly that (a situation not helped by Williamson’s characterisation of Kate as a woman of indiscriminate sexual appetites).

Jessica Clarke as Kate, Steve Mouzakis as Simmonds, William McKenna as Ross, and Eloise Mignon as Fiona (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Evident in Simmonds’s slow mauling of Fiona’s flesh is the vein of authority and control he has cultivated, using his position as sergeant, as police officer, as trusted enforcer of the law, to carve out his own little kingdom and indulge his own little pleasures. The slapped-down Ross is now permitted to put his zeal for thorough policing to good use, photographing Fiona’s thighs and never questioning Simmonds handling of the case. Keen to steer Fiona away from her marriage, Kate can see that allowing Simmonds his way is the only means to her own ends.

Under the guise of helping Fiona in her terrible situation, Simmonds comes up with a scheme to assist her to move from her flat while her husband Kenny (Michael Whalley) is at the pub with his mates. With the promise of whichever of the women Simmonds doesn’t land for himself and, more importantly, overtime, Ross is roped in to help. But all goes awry when Kenny comes home early, planning a night in front of the telly with the missus.

Williamson’s interest here is neither in police violence nor sexual violence per se (the two women function as little more than a device to impel three agitated men into the same room). Rather, what The Removalists exposes is the distorted – and distorting – ways (Australian) men assume and wield authority, and how much their self-esteem is wound up in their ability to dominate any situation in which they find themselves. In this way, the play poses questions as relevant today as they were when the play was first performed.

Anne-Louise Sark’s direction captures much of the play’s dark humour. While the rhythm of the comedy occasionally eludes the cast, the production is wonderfully funny, celebrating the wit and drollery of Williamson’s script. There is also in The Removalists a keen sense of the absurd, not least in the figure of the removalist himself (a deadpan Martin Blum), hired by Simmonds to do the heavy lifting of Fiona’s move while he himself attempts to lure the women. The removalist’s regular incursions into the battle between Simmonds, Ross, and the by now handcuffed Kenny – removing one piece of furniture after another, every pass through the main room of the flat initiating another anecdote about the moving business – is a Pinteresque stroke of genius. (The brilliance of this comic device is not lessened by the knowledge that it was the story of a real-life removalist that gave Williamson the basic outline of the plot.)

Where the production falters is in its inability to balance the absurdism of the script with its vital realism: there are all the laughs, but little of the necessary menace. As much as they huff and puff about their physical and sexual prowess, neither Mouzakis’s Simmonds nor Whalley’s Kenny give off the stench of potency and danger that the characters demand, meaning that the confrontations between them are more buffoonish scraps rather than tenacious battles for control. By teetering too far towards farce and thereby losing its anchor in reality, the production surrenders much of its power to shock. It also leaves Clarke and Mignon somewhat adrift, Fiona and Kate barely existing in the comic layers of the play.

The lack of fire in the play’s second act isn’t helped by a set which dissipates the action rather than concentrates it (set design by Dale Ferguson). The stage design in the first act (a police station that looks to have come straight out of Homicide or Division 4) manages to direct the action towards a central focal point. However, when the scene moves to Fiona’s flat (after an overly choreographed set change that releases any tension built during the scene in the police station), the design disperses the action, physically and emotionally distancing the actors and denying the play the claustrophobia that seems necessary to an authentic ignition of violence. (Adding to the design problems is a doorway which acts as entrance to both the police station and Fiona’s flat, and which is positioned in such a way as to obscure the action for sections of the audience. So too the unfathomable decision to seat some of the audience on what is, effectively, the back of the stage.)

The full force of The Removalists is revealed in the play’s climax, largely due to a revelatory performance from McKenna as Ross. In a few charged minutes we see the dreadful impact of Simmonds’s bullying. Simmonds might assure everyone a proper man knows how to give a beating without the bruises showing – an implicit indictment of Kenny’s ineptitude – but what Simmonds fails to see is that not every bruise, not every wound, is visible on the surface of the skin.

That there is, in the Australian character, an ingrained resistance to authority that can be traced back to our convict days has become something of an accepted truth. What The Removalists demonstrates is that there is nevertheless a concomitant willingness to lionise any imposition of authority that stands outside the law, outside social expectations. In their post-biff camaraderie, Kenny, Simmonds, and Ross swig on long-necks of beer and, like old soldiers, become almost nostalgic about the battle they have just endured. All’s well, it would seem, that ends well. But Williamson has one more surprise in store.

Some might judge Williamson’s denouement to be a convenient, if amusing, egress from the situation he has engineered, but there could be no more astute ending to The Removalists’ examination of the uses and abuses of authority: two men in sanctioned positions of authority – at once brothers and adversaries – beating each other to a pulp in order to save their own skins. 

*Three plays by Diane Stubbings have been produced at La Mama.

James McNamara wrote at length on The Removalists for the Reading Australia series sponsored by Copyright Agency.

The Removalists (Melbourne Theatre Company) continues at the Sumner Theatre until 17 April 2025. Performance attended: March 15.