2006

Away
by Michael Gow

Queensland Theatre Company
and Griffin Theatre Company
Dunstan Playhouse
Until September 23, 2006.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There can be few Australian plays as mercurial as Away. Written in the mid-Eighties, but set in the late Sixties, it focuses on three families going “away” for their summer holidays. It is full of affectionate retro-detail of Australian beach culture, but its central themes are of loss and death and the struggle to accept the inevitable and …

Michael Gow talks about his play, Away, twenty years after its first performance.

Murray Bramwell

When the Griffin Theatre production of Away opened at the Stables in Sydney on January 7, 1986, no-one, least of all thirty-one year old playwright, Michael Gow, had any idea what a successful, and much beloved play it would become. Written swiftly between November 1985 and the following January, the play reflected Gow’s preoccupations at that time:

“It was partly turning thirty and asking ‘how …