Michael Gow’s Away is something of a
mainstay on the high school syllabus, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a
student who hasn’t studied it (or at the very least, heard of it), sometime in
the past fifteen years or so. Set in the late 1960s, it is a coming-of-age
story on both a personal level as well as a cultural and societal level; the
Vietnam War is in full-force, conscription is very much a reality, Indigenous Australians
were constitutionally recognised, and the women’s rights movement was swiftly gaining
momentum. Produced by Sport for Jove
in the play’s thirtieth-anniversary year, Gow’s Away
here feels old, starts to show its age and, despite some nuanced moments, ultimately
fails to live up to its status as a classic.
Essentially a
series of vignettes – although there is a narrative progression which runs
throughout – Gow’s play follows three families over their Christmas holidays, and
details in soft-focus their fears, loves, losses, dreams, and the hurdles they
must overcome. Performed in the Seymour
Centre’s vast York Theatre, something of Gow’s intimacy is lost even if the
humanity at the heart of the story remains.
Two particular
things happened at the beginning of this year: I sat
down with director Eamon Flack for a discussion about his work, process,
and intentions as incoming artistic director of Belvoir; and I saw a Korean pansori production of Brecht’s Mother Courage – Ukchuk-ga
– at the Sydney Festival.
Without wanting to jinx Flack’s production so early on in the year, I believed Ukchuk-ga to be one of those transcendent
productions where you leave the theatre exhilarated, an emotional wreck because
of its story, stagecraft, and the simplicity of its craft. And I still firmly
believe that. Enter, then, Flack’s production of Mother
Courage and Her Children for Belvoir. In January, as in his notes in
the program, he talked about his desire to bring a taste of the global sense of
chaos to Sydney
in 2015, and trying to figure out how to do that in a theatrical way. And while
he does this to an extent, this Mother
Courage feels strangely empty, as though something is missing from it, and
I still don’t know what it is, several weeks and two viewings later.
This review was written for artsHub.
First performed in
1987, Europe is one
of Michael Gow’s earlier plays, but to pass it off as merely an ‘early work’ is
to do the play a disservice. Presented by Slip of the Tongue as part of the Seymour Centre’s Reginald Theatre
season, Europe takes you on a
grand journey of the heart to the cities where love lives larger and, well,
more romantically than perhaps anywhere else on the planet. But at the same
time, it asks us whether we are truly content with what we have, or whether we
need to chase something else, something bigger to make us feel alive?
Fifteen or sixteen
years ago, I loved a series of books about an archaeologist (and little-known
poet) called Cairo Jim who had
as companions a blue-and-gold macaw and a telepathic ‘wonder camel.’ The
brain-child of author Geoffrey McSkimming, the intrepid trio criss-crossed the
once-ancient world, foiling the nefarious schemes of Captain Neptune Bone,
restoring wrongs to rights, discovering immeasurable wonders and falling in
love with Jocelyn Osgood. My favourite was the very first volume
in the long-running series, Cairo Jim
& Doris in Search of Martenarten – there was something about it that
grabbed my nine-year-old imagination and kicked it into the stratosphere. There
was adventure by the bucketload, sand (lots of sand), and some very silly puns;
it was almost like an Errol Flynn film, or the Indiana Jones films, except in a
book, for younger readers. Like a lot of kids (and, I suppose, adults too), I
loved the mystery and intrigue that surrounded Ancient Egypt, all the gods and
tombs and treasures, the mummies wrapped in kilometres of bandages, the
colossal temples, pyramids, statues. Once I discovered the series had ended (at
least for the time-being, or so we are reassured), I read them all again, and
‘Martenarten’ is still the best.
Imagine, then, my
delight when I discovered Opera Australia’s regional
touring production for 2014 was a new version of Mozart’s immortal The Magic Flute,
set in 1930s Egypt
a la Indiana Jones. Inevitable
quibbles of Hollywood B-movies and Saturday
afternoon serials aside, this Magic Flute,
directed and adapted by Michael Gow, is full of the adventure, danger, romance
and magic that Mozart’s music so perfectly captures, and is an inordinate
amount of fun.
A new play is
always something to look forward to. Griffin Theatre Company knows this, and
has made it their mission to be Australia’s new writing theatre. Back in
1986, Griffin produced Michael Gow’s (third)
play Away; a critical and
popular success, it quickly became Australia’s most produced play as well as a mainstay
of English syllabuses across the country. Now, twenty-eight years later, Eamon
Flack is directing Gow’s latest play, Once In
Royal David’s City for Belvoir.
Billed as “eloquent,
playful, big-thinking, tender and fierce … an astonishing act of theatrical
invention,” it sounds like it should be the next Babyteeth
(also directed by Flack for Belvoir). But a strange thing happens to Gow’s
play, when it is taken off the page and put on its feet, when it is spoken and
acted. On the page, it is very dialogue-heavy which all theatre is by default.
But on its feet, it is very much the Will Drummond show, almost an
uninterrupted one-hundred-minute monologue, in which the other characters
(actors?) are merely pawns in his chess game, tools to help him tell his story.
