Michael Gow talks about his play, Away, twenty years after its first performance.<\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
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\u2019s preoccupations at that time:<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was partly turning thirty and asking \u2018how did I get to be who I am \u2013 and others around me, how they got to be where they were ?\u2019 I was an actor in a production of King Lear at Nimrod. I was playing Oswald and various other spear carriers and I got to know the play backwards because I listened to it every night. I remember thinking – \u2018How do you get to the level where you have the kind of freedom to go anywhere and say anything that Shakespeare had ?\u2019 And I thought – you just do it by ditching all the rules. If I want to write a scene here, or there, I can. \u201c<\/p>\n
Reflecting on that time Gow recalls the mixed fortunes of friends, some going off the rails, others making their fortune, while their parents were going through divorce and other changes. All this mid-80\u2019s upheaval found itself drawn into a play set in Australia at the very beginning of 1968 \u2013 the Summer of Love, but also the most vexed year of the escalating Vietnam War. <\/p>\n
Gow\u2019s play consists of three families going \u201caway\u201d for the summer holidays, each taking with them unresolved difficulties. Roy is a headmaster and he and his wife Coral are dealing with the recent death of their son as a conscript in war. Vic and Harry are an English working class couple whose schoolboy son, Tom, is seriously ill with cancer, while Jim, his abrasive wife Gwen and daughter Meg also are taking a break which is heading for breakdown.<\/p>\n
The Shakespearean framework is deliberate as Gow explains \u2013
\n\u201cFor a long time it was going to be As You Like It \u2013 leaving the city and going to the Forest of Arden – but I just couldn\u2019t make it work. So I thought of other \u201caway\u2019 plays like A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, which had a play-within-a play, and Pericles, because it has someone being brought back to life and a father-daughter relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of the 60s setting \u2013 when he himself was only in his early teens \u2013 he notes:
\n\u201cIt is only out of whack about five years. As a kid I had no friends my own age, they were all older. Because I was an only child I was already on my way to being a writer because I spent so much time observing everything. I found older kids more interesting because they were facing the call-up of the Draft and the expectations on them were enormous \u2013 girlfriends and engagement and marriage. There were all kinds of cultural patterns to fit in to.\u201d <\/p>\n
That the play could so elegantly contain a sense of a world on the cusp of irrevocable change was not the result of Gow\u2019s cool deliberation. He describes writing the play for Griffin at short notice, when their summer project had fallen through. He wryly quotes Mark Twain \u2013 \u201cnothing focuses a man like death and a deadline!\u201d <\/p>\n
He also had other things on his mind at the time \u2013 performing the title role in the Thalia Company production of Hamlet at the Adelaide Festival. \u201cI was so obsessed getting Hamlet right that I wrote the play at nights and weekends. Then I went to the opening night and people said \u2013 \u2018Well, this is good.\u2019 It seemed as though it had happened without me.\u201d <\/p>\n
The play and – Michael Gow\u2019s reputation – quickly gathered momentum.
\nAfter Griffin, it transferred to a sell-out season at the Sydney Theatre Company and, continued to the end of the next year, gathering major awards and anenthusiastic reception from audiences and critics. By 1989 it was a high school text and the script, published by Currency Press, had sold 10,000 copies. Current sales now exceed 100,000. <\/p>\n
While he had co-directed the play with Richard Wherrett in the late 80s, it was not until 1992 that Gow first directed Away himself. Now, as Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company since 1999, he has prepared a new production for a tour marking the play\u2019s 20th anniversary.<\/p>\n
I asked him how it feels to return to the play. \u201cFortunately I am still impressed by most of the writing, there are some really well-written scenes in there. And, because I am going in and out of the tour, I \u2018m seeing it over and over again and haven\u2019t yet gone \u2013 oh God ! – which is a great sign. I enjoy listening to it, and I like the production because the cast are a great bunch.<\/p>\n
\u201cI find it a sadder experience because a lot of the people who went into it \u2013 like my parents and their friends \u2013 are all dead now. So it feels more elegiac than in \u201886. It is, in a sense, more of a farewell than when it was written. It has a new ending \u2013 which alarms school teachers. When I did the play in 1992 I asked myself a lot of questions such as \u2013 \u2018when Tom has done his play on the beach is his function over and is his reading of King Lear redundant ?\u2019 I decided to give the reading to Meg. Tom is there, but in another kind of present that\u2019s all his own.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone says that Away is so much fun and so enjoyable. I think of it as a play about death. So I want to make this production mine and remind us of the darkness and malevolence. The performance history of the play is of school and amateur productions and I feel it is my duty to stand up for the other side of the coin. \u201c Even the fairies are not the little gumnuts of earlier versions. \u201cThese fairies are bad. That\u2019s what it should be, they are little shits.\u201d <\/p>\n
But that doesn\u2019t mean that the playwright is indifferent to that airy quality in the play which has made it so perpetually appealing. I ask whether he marvels at the thirty year old who wrote the play ?<\/p>\n
\u201cI am incredibly grateful that wherever it came from, it picked me. There is a freedom and lightness to it and the interesting thing for me has been thinking about what I\u2019ll do next. Revisiting Away has done that for me. I see how, in a page of dialogue, I\u2019ve covered so much ground and conveyed so much information in a dramatic way. How did I do that ? Meditating on that has been really exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n
The State theatre Company season of Away runs from 12- 23 September in the Dunstan Playhouse.<\/p>\n
\u201cGow goes Away\u201d The Adelaide Review, No.300, September 8, 2006, p.12<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s preoccupations at that time: \u201cIt was partly turning thirty and asking \u2018how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","category-state-theatre-company","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":951,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions\/951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}