The power issues in The Club by David Williamson are shown throughout the play. The characters are all different with their personalities and roles within The Club. In his play The Club, David Williamson presents numerous Australian attitudes of the 1970s. However, many of these attitudes are still relevant and fairly accurate representations of Australian attitudes in the 1990s, David Williamson uses power to show the tension in the club and between the members. Tradition plays a very important part in The Club.
Each of the characters of course has his own ideas and attitudes towards tradition, but there are some which are more or less universal throughout the play. In The Club, tradition is mainly presented as the opposite to progress and success; that is, to achieve success in today’s world, tradition must be abandoned. David Williamson engages power throughout his whole text as each individual character plays a different role and position in the committee. Most of the play he has based on the power struggles involving the characters.
The power between Laurie and Jock is evident by Laurie’s accusation that Jock only supported the committee traditional approach to stop Laurie from succeeding. “They might have believed in it but the reason why wouldn’t let the club buy players was to stop me winning a flag. ” Williamson uses diction and tone to bring out the responders. Tone is the pattern of pitch and stress in spoken language that conveys a speaker’s feelings to the listener. Diction is the specific word choice used in the characters conversation.
Williamson’s purpose of using these 2 techniques is to suggest and identifies us how sceaming and manipulative Jock is so he can achieve and accomplish his own hidden agenda’s also as he criticizes Laurie and doesn’t want him to buy players. This quote gives me an understanding of how Jock wants to keep his legacy going and feels he has the power to control that as he doesn’t want the team to improve as he knows he has a good coach Laurie to change it to a first class team.
Furthermore David Williamson’s exposes the conflict that exists to commercialism within the AFL game where the club is seen as a satire of a professional football club, who are under pressure of a group of people trying to gain upper hand. Commercialism is portrayed by Gerry, where he derives power and wealth from the Club at any cost. “I don’t love the club’ and I don’t particularly like the game” this is ironic One of David Williamson’s major issues in “The Club” is tradition and loyalty. Each of the characters in the play has different attitudes towards traditions.
Throughout the club, tradition is mainly presented as the opposite to progress and achievement. Laurie blames an old club tradition for his failure to win a premiership. “You and your cronies wouldn’t let me buy any players” in return, Jock replies “We were up holding an old tradition, it was wrong but we believe in it” in this Laurie uses colloquial and slang language to lash out at Jock, but uses more sensible formal language style of replying to Laurie’s statement about the game. Colloquial language is the everyday spoken language that uses informal structure and vocabulary this is linked to the quote by Jock as it
