Away

Away is a play by the Australian playwright Michael Gow, written in 1986 and set at Christmas 1967 to 1968. It follows three families whose separate seaside holidays are driven together by a storm, and is set for the HSC English Standard Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences.

Written in 1986 but set at Christmas 1967 to 1968, Away follows three Australian families whose separate holidays are driven together by a storm. The play opens on a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Tom, the son of English migrants Harry and Vic, playing Puck, and Meg, daughter of the prosperous Gwen and Jim, in the cast. Roy is the headmaster; his wife Coral sits silent and grief-struck in the audience, her son killed in the Vietnam War. Tom, the audience soon learns, is seriously ill with leukaemia, and his family carries on as normally as it can rather than name it.

The families set out separately. Coral drifts through a resort like a ghost while Roy urges her that grief must end; Gwen's anxious materialism curdles the family holiday; Tom and his parents head for a modest beach. Then a great storm - staged, in Gow's boldest stroke, by the fairies from the school play - scatters the campers, destroys Gwen's careful holiday, and delivers the three families, humbled and exposed, toward one another.

On the beach afterwards, Tom pushes Meg toward intimacy and she withdraws; Coral, drawn to the dying boy in whom she sees the son she lost, performs a small play with him and speaks herself back into life. Gwen, broken open by the storm and the news of Tom's illness, softens; Roy and Coral are reconciled; and the play closes on a class reading of King Lear, with Tom speaking the lines.

The play circles grief and the ways people manage it. Roy tries to fold a private catastrophe into a general story, reminding Coral that others have lost sons in war, and demands that mourning keep to a timetable. Coral cannot obey, and her recovery is staged rather than argued: inside the play she performs with Tom she enacts a woman relearning how to move through the world, and her reconciliation with Roy is carried by gesture rather than speech.

Against these managed griefs stands the migrant family's honesty. Harry names the unbearable plainly, holding acceptance and despair in balance. Tom himself refuses every adult euphemism, and his hunger for experience is not teenage impatience but a dying boy's refusal to defer living.

Class is the wall the storm must break. Gwen, self-made and newly comfortable, looks down on the migrant family's modest means - judgements that expose a terror of the poverty she remembers, which Jim gently tries to explain away. It is not argument that softens her but shared exposure to loss.

Over it all Gow lays a Shakespearean frame. Puck's epilogue, "If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended", opens the play with comedy's promise that confusion can be healed; Lear's "while we / Unburthen'd crawl toward death", read by the dying Tom, closes it with tragedy's insistence that healing is bought with loss. The storm between them, echoing the tempest in Lear, purges rather than destroys.