Peter Fitzpatrick

A play in two acts by Michael Gow. premiere 7 January 1986, Stables Theatre, Sydney by Griffin Theatre Company. Cast: Vanessa Downing, Benjamin Franklin, Julie Godfrey, Christian Hodge, David Lynch, Andrea Moor, Geoff Morrell, Angela Toohey. Designer: Robert Kemp. Director: Peter Kingston. Published Sydney: Currency Press 1986.

One of the most frequently revived Australian plays, Away opens with the close of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and closes with the opening of King Lear. These reference points, together with extracts from Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the Dream, contribute importantly to the play's structure and atmosphere. The first act begins like yet another satire on suburban banality as three families at a school play look forward to the summer holidays. Behind it, however, is nostalgia for the innocently booming Australia of the 1960s.

ln the second act the play becomes a different kind of comedy. Couples who are locked into ritual and pretence at home are freed by the experience of being 'away' on the northeast coast to evolve new understandings that may prove to be durable. Harry and Vic, an English couple whose son Tom is dying of leukaemia, are less a target for satire than the others. Gow's major satiric objects are Jim and Gwen, parents of Tom's friend Meg. Gwen is obsessed with keeping up appearances. But all the parents in Away have much to learn.

The transformations are partly atrributable to relocation, to a storm that exposes everyone to the elements on an unknown beach, and to confrontation with Tom's real tragedy. However they also stem from a shift in mode. Away relies less on dialogue as it moves away from familiar places and familiar ways of looking at them. Anti-realist staging of the storm with the fairies from the opening scene, the romantic suggestiveness of the music, a strange play that Tom and Coral stage for the campers, as well as Shakespeare's verse, all gesture toward an order of knowledge that resists common sense. The couples' final reconciliations are all wordless. Away becomes comedy of the Shakespearean kind, in which harmony is established where only discord had seemed possible. Gow seems to achieve that against all odds when Tom at the end begins to read from King Lear. There is cruel irony in the boy, who is about to die, speaking the words of the octogenarian Lear. Gow refuses to be embarrassed about those kinds of emotional claims, and makes them real and memorable. In 1992, when Gow directed the play in Sydney he gave Meg the final reading, making Tom's death tangible. This version has been adopted in subsequent productions.