Away
by Michael Gow
State Theatre Company
Playhouse

The State Theatre Company and director Aubrey Mellor have concluded another season with a strong production. But although done with flair last year’s Wild Honey was really just tizzied up minor Chekhov. This year’s work is a new Australian play of some distinction.

Away has been widely performed in the past two years – there have been three separate productions in the last month alone. Such fulsome attention might prove daunting for Michael Gow as he embarks on new work, but it is no surprise that Away has been making a few waves because, unlike the majority of new plays devoted either to listless naturalism or mouldy symbolism, Gow’s work is fresh and inventive.

Away takes its cue from Shakespearean comedy where both young and old are spirited from their daily round in order to see themselves more clearly. It is a benign theatre of reconciliation and resolution, it doesn’t necessarily put the world to rights but it improves the angle of vision.

Three families attend an end-of-year school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream before preparing to go on holiday to Queensland. Tom, Vic and Harry are migrants glad to be free of Blighty, Jim and Gwen are bewildered by their daughter Meg who represents a society contemptuous of the acquisitive materialism of the Depression ethic, Coral and Harry mourn their son conscripted to die in the silent war in Vietnam and young fry Tom and Meg wonder whether there is life after Matric.

The period is nominally the summer of 1967- the Hippies’ Summer of Love is better characterised by the language of anxiety and conflict than by pacifist platitudes. The War was marauding through young lives, feminism was finding a new voice for old grievances and Australia was no longer the favourite nephew of the Empire.

Michael Gow’s play makes little or no direct reference to any of this, but his gentle comedy is circumscribed by historical necessity. That it is so shrewdly expressed and with such assurance, distinguishes Gow’s play from those of duller and heavier hands.

Director Aubrey Mellor and designer Kim Carpenter have opted for a spacious, exhilarating production while preserving the tenderness of Gow’s characterisation. So the fusty curtains of the school hall’s play open out on a sea and skyscape in radiant vistavision. For the psychopathology of everyday domestic life Carpenter uses · minimal props. Three letterboxes and three doorframes denote Our Town and when it is holiday time giant postcards complete with stamps are lowered depicting gaudy cartoons of Gold Coast hotels and caravan parks. For the more transcendant moments the players step through huge, empty Magritte-like picture frames on to the dunes of redemption (all this with paradisal silhouettes from lighting designer John Comeadow.)

Because Gow is so fearless in coopting Shakespearean conventions such as tempests and necromancy it is more than disappointing that this production refused to believe in its fairies.

The use of The Midsummer Night’s Dream fairies as Ariels to Gow’s Prospero is bold and theatrically novel but gussied up as May Gibberish gumnut babies they are disavowed. As other-worldly, libidinous forces the fairies denote unawakened presences and desires in these good people on holiday and dramatically should provide an edgy dissonance. Here, they are too embarassingly coy even to be light relief. They are meant to be fay not fey . In agreeing to this ludicrous travesty Gow does not seem to acknowledge the imaginative power of his own device.

This production has called up some fine performances from a number of State Theatre Company regulars. Jane Menelaus gives a fine performance as Coral, neurasthenic with grief and nervily aware of the absurdity of most social encounter. The character is reminiscent of Lotte in Botho Strauss’s Big and Little in her determinedly cheerful cauchemar. Don Barker, feckless, avuncular and vexed as her husband Roy, provides a considerate foil while Peter Crossley as Harry, yeoman Englishman and Patrick Frost’s emotionally frozen Jim are memorable in their clarity and dignity. Jeremy Scrivener and Catherine McClements also acquit themselves well as Tom and Meg at an awkward age in an awkward age.

Carole Skinner as Gwen, the little Aussie battleaxe, skilfully steers the role beyond mere raucousness. When Vic (played with gamine charm by Barbara West) and Gwen potter off over the dunes (while Harry and Jim exchange mumbles and stuttering non-verbals about the Terrible Thing which is going to happen to young Tom) to return with Gwen richly sea-changed, it has been seen by some as contrived and unconvincing.

But for Gow the enchanted isle is a place for transformation and the revelation of a more whole self. That’s what the Forest of Arden is for heaven’s sake. Unfortunately Mellor’s production doesn’t quite believe in Shakespeare either.

The question of resolution in the play is, of course, an uncertain one and Gow himself intrudes a specious element when the cast in the final scene, all in school uniforms like a scene from Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills, start reciting scenes from Lear. There is a lot of distracting talk of kingdoms divided in three and so on when it seems likely that the whole scene is only contrived for Tom to deliver a deathless one-liner on mortality.

But these are quibbles finally. Away succeeds because of its tender comedy and its imaginative breadth. The playwright takes formidable risks and mostly gets away with them. Mellor’s production, at its most focused, captures Michael Gow’s sublime vision and when you add Mendelsohn’s Nocturne and Carpenter’s shimmering set, then Away is, as they used to say in 1967, something else again.

Murray Bramwell

“Dreamtime” The Adelaide Review, No.46, January, 1988, pp.21-2.