Michael Gow's Away (1986) is a tender-hearted exploration of family life. Set in the mid 1960s, it still throws light upon our shared history of the Australian summer, trailing its undercurrents into view. We witness the nagging perfection of the consumerist lifestyle; the perennial flow of migrant families staking out a new life; the ache that haunts a family when its children die; and how relationships fracture and coalesce into new meaning. It is a piece of theatre that rejoices in artifice: the play within a play, the dreamlike, the coup de theatre that evinces awe and delight.
At the heart of the play are a series of transformations, where grace and understanding descend, like a holy ghost, over the more troubled characters, men and women, young and old.
The masculinity on show in this play is highly nuanced.
The portrayal of Tom, the young man dying of leukaemia, ranges from a deep welled understanding of how familial love operates through to the hormonal thrashings of a young man who knows he is going to die and wants to taste the fruits of sex before he does.
His gaucheness and his reflective nature are given fulsome focus by Liam Nunan. Likewise, Wadih Dona beautifully articulates the love, sadness and knowledge of his father, Harry. His confession on the beach, after the transfiguring storm, is a great moment of theatre, wherein a father evokes his tender love for his dying child. Harry riffs on hope and despair and the threads of love that keep us buoyant within our grief. This is almost Verdian in its power and beauty.
That this emerged after the breakdown of Gwen and the rebirth of her stunted feelings, still unable to name them, but aware of their unquenchable power and the need to express the inexpressible, tells us how rich this play is in both character development and in laying down an intricate web of connections, as though Puck is still weaving his summer magic and corrective madness.
Heather Mitchell as Gwen gives us the full glory of the bottled up termagant. With razor sharp precision she plants our understanding of the febrile pain that animates Gwen’s disordered thirst for a planned life, with its implied betterment and the undercurrent of “hunger, never again”. Gwen is a great comic creation but one tethered to transformation as her awakening friendship with Tom’s mother and her understanding of the meaning of the holiday play attests.
Julia Davis as Vic, Tom’s mother, creates a warm maternal presence, a jolly kind of tenderness that allows the young Tom to commune with her in a playful way, their exchanges laced with mutual understanding.
Natasha Herbert as Coral, living the nightmare of her dazed, uncontrollable grief – modelled on Shakespearean melancholy - is truly arresting in her rooftop scene with the young fitter and turner, Rick (Nunan). Like an enchantress, she teases out the unsatisfied truth of his ‘salad days’ life and settles for his touch and kiss as a reminder of her dead son, communing with the dead, so to speak. Her work with Tom, in the holiday play, The Stranger on the Shore, was delightfully deadpan and deeply moving.
Marco Chiappi as the peacemaker Jim uses a droll and sonorous voice that precisely articulates his predicament, his knowledge and his suppressed anger, deep within fighting his own desire for the structured order that his wife wills into being.
Glenn Hazeldine struggled a little with his portrayal of Roy, the headmaster. The voice he employs is not an ingratiating one. It worked for the faux pas Headmaster’s speech, but in the confrontations with Coral, when he threatens her and her grief with incarceration, he did not plumb the depths of anger and despair that should underpin this last resort, with its chilling codicil of ‘shock therapy”. This actor seems better attuned to comedy.
Likewise, Naomi Rukavina did not give us a particularly rich portrayal of young Meg. She was a believable child, but the scene where Tom attempts, badly, to seduce her, did not flicker with much emotion or tension on her behalf, nor did the weight of his impending death draw forth much nuanced feeling. Her Christmas day confrontation with her mum - over the missing Christmas gifts – showed such much needed spark, working nicely against the hard flint of Mitchell’s mother.
The design (Dale Ferguson) was excellent. The creation of the storm and its glowing white aftermath was beautiful and majestic and full of frisson.
The energy of the cast in the various pantomimes (choreography, Stephanie Lake) kept the implied threat of potential danger and liberation threading through the action. The mid 1960s costuming was arresting in the luxury of its gilded kaleidoscopic colours. The lighting (Paul Jackson) and sound (J. David Franzke) were essential elements to our immersion in the play – Mendelssohn and Shakespeare ushering us into the opening moment of amateur theatre and its incendiary power to liberate. The storm scene hints at the essential and elemental and mimicked the power that Shakespeare gives to nature’s unbridled extravagances.
This work is full of deep comedy and poetry and the spell of wonderment. When we come away from the dream world of these frolicsome humans we have been touched and our own relationships seem somewhat altered. As Helena says at the end of the lovers drugged state in A Midsummer Nights Dream: “mine own and not mine own”. Love has been refocussed and enlarged and the hint of an unsettled world explored. We thank Michael Gow for that experience and director Matthew Lutton.
Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre Production, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, March 21, 2017
At the heart of the play are a series of transformations, where grace and understanding descend, like a holy ghost, over the more troubled characters, men and women, young and old.
The masculinity on show in this play is highly nuanced.
The portrayal of Tom, the young man dying of leukaemia, ranges from a deep welled understanding of how familial love operates through to the hormonal thrashings of a young man who knows he is going to die and wants to taste the fruits of sex before he does.
His gaucheness and his reflective nature are given fulsome focus by Liam Nunan. Likewise, Wadih Dona beautifully articulates the love, sadness and knowledge of his father, Harry. His confession on the beach, after the transfiguring storm, is a great moment of theatre, wherein a father evokes his tender love for his dying child. Harry riffs on hope and despair and the threads of love that keep us buoyant within our grief. This is almost Verdian in its power and beauty.
That this emerged after the breakdown of Gwen and the rebirth of her stunted feelings, still unable to name them, but aware of their unquenchable power and the need to express the inexpressible, tells us how rich this play is in both character development and in laying down an intricate web of connections, as though Puck is still weaving his summer magic and corrective madness.
Heather Mitchell as Gwen gives us the full glory of the bottled up termagant. With razor sharp precision she plants our understanding of the febrile pain that animates Gwen’s disordered thirst for a planned life, with its implied betterment and the undercurrent of “hunger, never again”. Gwen is a great comic creation but one tethered to transformation as her awakening friendship with Tom’s mother and her understanding of the meaning of the holiday play attests.
Julia Davis as Vic, Tom’s mother, creates a warm maternal presence, a jolly kind of tenderness that allows the young Tom to commune with her in a playful way, their exchanges laced with mutual understanding.
Natasha Herbert as Coral, living the nightmare of her dazed, uncontrollable grief – modelled on Shakespearean melancholy - is truly arresting in her rooftop scene with the young fitter and turner, Rick (Nunan). Like an enchantress, she teases out the unsatisfied truth of his ‘salad days’ life and settles for his touch and kiss as a reminder of her dead son, communing with the dead, so to speak. Her work with Tom, in the holiday play, The Stranger on the Shore, was delightfully deadpan and deeply moving.
Marco Chiappi as the peacemaker Jim uses a droll and sonorous voice that precisely articulates his predicament, his knowledge and his suppressed anger, deep within fighting his own desire for the structured order that his wife wills into being.
Glenn Hazeldine struggled a little with his portrayal of Roy, the headmaster. The voice he employs is not an ingratiating one. It worked for the faux pas Headmaster’s speech, but in the confrontations with Coral, when he threatens her and her grief with incarceration, he did not plumb the depths of anger and despair that should underpin this last resort, with its chilling codicil of ‘shock therapy”. This actor seems better attuned to comedy.
Likewise, Naomi Rukavina did not give us a particularly rich portrayal of young Meg. She was a believable child, but the scene where Tom attempts, badly, to seduce her, did not flicker with much emotion or tension on her behalf, nor did the weight of his impending death draw forth much nuanced feeling. Her Christmas day confrontation with her mum - over the missing Christmas gifts – showed such much needed spark, working nicely against the hard flint of Mitchell’s mother.
The design (Dale Ferguson) was excellent. The creation of the storm and its glowing white aftermath was beautiful and majestic and full of frisson.
The energy of the cast in the various pantomimes (choreography, Stephanie Lake) kept the implied threat of potential danger and liberation threading through the action. The mid 1960s costuming was arresting in the luxury of its gilded kaleidoscopic colours. The lighting (Paul Jackson) and sound (J. David Franzke) were essential elements to our immersion in the play – Mendelssohn and Shakespeare ushering us into the opening moment of amateur theatre and its incendiary power to liberate. The storm scene hints at the essential and elemental and mimicked the power that Shakespeare gives to nature’s unbridled extravagances.
This work is full of deep comedy and poetry and the spell of wonderment. When we come away from the dream world of these frolicsome humans we have been touched and our own relationships seem somewhat altered. As Helena says at the end of the lovers drugged state in A Midsummer Nights Dream: “mine own and not mine own”. Love has been refocussed and enlarged and the hint of an unsettled world explored. We thank Michael Gow for that experience and director Matthew Lutton.
Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre Production, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, March 21, 2017