Death Takes a Holiday

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Like the play it helped spawn, the '60s snapshot is remarkable for its ordinariness. Against a sand dune the young family sit: mother in straw hat and Dame Edna glasses; a bronzed, bare-chested father holding his knee; their son dressed in a tropical shirt squinting at the sun. The latter is Michael Gow aged 6, holidaying near Ulladulla on the New South Wales south coast, though that's about all the Australian playwright can remember. "In my memory, Christmas holidays went from about 1959 to 1970," recalls Gow, 51. "There's just this kind of weird dream."

From that dazzle of sun and surf, Gow summoned up a classic of Australian theater. His 1986 play Away, which interwove the lives of three families holidaying on the coast during Christmas 1967, instantly hit audience heart strings. And in presenting young lives touched by the shadow of death, from cancer to Vietnam, Gow poetically dramatized a country's coming of age. "Another Australia emerges," dramaturg May-Brit Akerholt has written, "a country which is no longer an isolated island but part of an extended world."

In the 20 years since, Away has conquered the world it so delightfully critiques, becoming Australia's most performed play—not only in its home country, where it is a staple of high-school reading lists, but also throughout Asia, North America and New Zealand. "Although a glossary of Australian idiom is provided in the program," noted the New York Times in 1988, "the pain and burdens Mr. Gow's characters carry with them really need no translation." And as a 20th anniversary staging by the Queensland Theatre Company and Griffin (which returned the play to its stage birthplace in Sydney last week) makes clear, the magic still carries. Under Gow's own direction, his characters effortlessly take on the weight of the world—and spirit audiences away.

A stage curtain watched over by the Queen's portrait and a packet of sparklers are the simple sense-memory props that begin the journey: we are backstage at an end-of-year school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Puckish Tom (Leon Cain), the son of poor English migrants, is making his first tentative teenage overtures to middle-class Meg (Francesca Savige); her shrewish mother Gwen (Barbara Lowing) in turn is being gently snubbed by the headmaster's aloof wife Coral (Georgina Symes). As the three families go their separate ways over Christmas—to camp, caravan park and Gold Coast resort, respectively—only to meet up on the same stretch of beach after a New Year storm, Gow miraculously captures the full weave of Australian baby-boomer society. Here the cultural reference points are Kim Novak, Chips Rafferty and Dame Pattie Menzies, and Roger Kemp's production design rings true right down to the box of Bex on the lino floor. But Away is more than just a nostalgic escape into the past. Beneath the Day-Glo costumes and suburban chit-chat lurks an inconsolable pain. As it transpires, Tom has terminal leukemia, and Coral is still grieving the death of her son in Vietnam. Capturing the mood of this so-called Lucky Country is Tom's grimly smiling father Harry (Daniel Murphy), who says, "In a funny kind of way we're happy. Even while we're very, very sad." His comment also captures the perfectly judged pathos of this production, for which Gow has subtly tweaked the ending. "It's a play about death," he explains. "And how you deal with that shows how you value life, I guess." Putting his family snapshot on the poster and program accompanying Away's current national tour (which runs until October) also acknowledges how much the play is about the playwright. "It was a turning-30 play," Gow says, "so it was very much: Where am I from? Who am I? How did I get to be this? It all ended up in that play."

As a playwright since, Gow has never sought to recapture the butterfly spirit of Away. "I have a short attention span," he says. Instead he wrote the stage equivalent of a fingers-up sign to the Australian Bicentennial with 1841, took an Edward Albee-esque look at modern marriage in Sweet Phoebe (in which Cate Blanchett made her British stage debut) and, most recently, had actors perform The Iliad in underpants (Live Acts on Stage). But it is as a director that Gow is now making his mark. As artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company since 1999, he has energetically championed young writers. Still, the best master class he could offer would be a ticket to Away in the tiny Stables space where it was first performed. "There's something about its poverty and its rawness," says Gow. "You can't whack in a couple of revolves and some amazing lighting. It's got to be about the story well told." His is the extraordinary one that got Away.