THEATRE
AWAY ★★★★½
Michael Gow
Malthouse Theatre
Until May 28
In 13 years as a theatre critic, I've never seen a production of Michael Gow's 1986 play Away. That's a crime for a play with a reputation as a modern Australian classic and I confess some trepidation at the thought of a first encounter under the auspices of director Matt Lutton, whose imagination for visual theatre is often unmatched by, and can sometimes seem unmoored from, a secure grasp of the verbal aspect of performance craft.
I needn't have worried. The show is magnificent on every level.
Lutton creates a fever-dream of 1960s Australia with an epical frame on a wide brown stage which, paradoxically, invites us to telescope in on intimate, beautifully turned performances.
The acting is sublime, achieving a resonance and theatricality that reminded me strongly of Lee Lewis' Twelfth Night from some years back, set in the ashes of the Black Saturday bushfires.
Liam Nunan is luminous as the dying young actor at the centre of the play, from the torment of an adolescent crush opposite Naomi Rukavina's Meg, to his parting gift – a spell of release from the grief to come.
His sprite-like quality is sharpened by his 10-pound Pom parents (Julia Davis and Wadih Donah), who seize each moment and bravely muddle through.
As Meg's snobbish and controlling mother, Heather Mitchell fills out a frightful, familiar – and hilariously well-observed – suit of armour.
Behind the ugliness of her quenchless aspiration, and the misery it consigns her to, lies an abject poverty the latest generation of Australians can only imagine.
Glenn Hazeldine is effortlessly amusing as the headmaster and achieves pathos as a small man overwhelmed by the vastness of his wife's grief. Their son was killed in Vietnam, and Natasha Herbert gives a brilliant fugue of a performance as a woman haunted to the point of dissociation.
That Lutton can nurture acting of this calibre – it's funny and moving and true, and excavates as many troubling as nourishing seams in the Australian psyche – is a credit to him.
The superb design – which evokes a high-school production of Shakespeare through a kind of phantasmagorical ballet; glitzy conga lines of '60s revellers; a purging storm (in an arresting, majestic coup de theatre); and a beach scrubbed clean that doubles as a clinical antechamber to death – creatively engages the play's themes in a way that feels at once timeless and fresh.
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