Review: Away at MUST Space

Review by Greg Gorton

Michael Gow’s Away is one of the most well-known scripts in Australia, thanks to a constant existence in school curriculums everywhere. It’s an honest look at a middle-class Australia at the end of the sixties, following three families on their respective holidays, as they deal with interpersonal relationships and the problems caused by racism, mourning, and fears of impending death. 

Despite a narrative that is easy for most to empathise with, Away is a complex play to produce. There are moments of surrealist physical theatre and neck-breaking whiplash moments as characters jump in and out of monologues/soliloquies. While other plays deal with comedy and tragedy together, Gow choses to split each moment, making things either comedy or dark and never both. This all makes the play near impossible to produce.

Of course, the Monash University Student Theatre group (MUST) are no strangers to tackling the difficult. In my experience, at least, they often pull off some of the best theatre in the state through bold and original interpretations.

Acknowledging the myriad of themes and motifs in Away, MUST makes a firm decision which certainly helps with the production’s cohesion. As Assistant Director Esme Stripp expresses in the programme, “we wanted to centre performativity in our vision— most significantly, the performance of the holiday [..] Approaching Away from this angle, [...] allowed [us] to find so much more depth and nuance than we would have found otherwise.”

This focus on performativity is clear through most of the action in this play, especially when following the Meg’s family as well as Coral and Roy. While early scenes of Tom’s family don’t have that same clarity, it improves when the audience is given more explicit information regarding their circumstances.

I’m not sure why this is true regardless of the directorial team, but MUST never fail to properly use space and time in story-telling. A simple and uncomplicated set design is offered by Marni McCubbin, and the blocking by Max Pickering is clear and insightful. This allows the stage space to be fully utilised when handling the constant scene changes,  and visually expresses the power dynamics between and within groups. It also gives room to explore the more surrealist moments within the play. Kirra O’Keefe’s costuming places this play firmly in its original context with a naturalist design, while only the most minimal and story-enhancing props are used. 

It is only the lighting design that I felt went too far. Others might appreciate the theme-linked colour changes in a way my poor colour-blind eyes might not. I may also be lacking proper appreciation regarding the lighting's role in highlighting the fractured nature of the play’s narrative. So while I found the design too overly complex in comparison to the rest of the production, I might possibly be alone in that assessment.

It is important to note that MUST’s creative team is larger than most, with (sometimes multiple) assistants aiding the main designers. While it would be too much to name each one, it is clear that all played roles in a truly community-oriented production. In that context, I believe all should be praised, and be proud of their contributions to this show.

As an ensemble, the actors in Away work well together, even in presenting a wide range of ages using a cast with considerably less range. Grace Jackson and Patrick Leong work well as the teenage children, and Felicity Barrow (who I previously adored as Marie Antoinette) ensures that the role of Carol is far from the one-dimensional portrayals that have “graced” past stages. 

The actor I most want to praise, however, is Lucy Fraser as Gwen. Not only does Fraser carefully walk that tightrope between the stereotype and the corny, each scene they appear in seems to invigorate the other actors, elevating their own performances. It’s a firm belief of mine that our own work’s quality can be changed dramatically by those we work alongside, and Fraser only adds more evidence to this argument.

The directing of this play is quite strong, with the more traditional theatre moments between characters coming to life. The audience laughed in recognition at many of the petty family conflicts we could relate to, and couldn’t help but cheer at many of the additional dances. I must explicitly point out here that the original compositions by Alex Aidt are world-class and you could easily have convinced me that they were cribbed from a professional source.

Gow is quite erratic in his provided scene directions, and these were handled quite competently. Wordless stories (such as the setting up of the christmas trees) were brilliant additions to the text, and the MUST directorial team were not afraid to use silence when most effective. Overall the pacing would be difficult to fault.

Where MUST did struggle with Gow’s complicated script was in finding a way to use the long monologues. While some had been “solved” and worked well in the play, others came about as too disconnected from the scene. Some actors also appeared to struggle with acting here, perhaps with too much concentration on precise recitation of the words rather than expression of their meaning. This is a difficulty faced in all productions of this work, and is rarely worked out with success.

While I think it is clear by now that I found Away to be a professional production of a difficult play, there are two minor praises I wish to give about elements rarely discussed in reviews. The first, an acknowledgement of a country that (in a paradoxically positive irony) truly acknowledged the long history of story-telling in Australia and difficulty of doing so while presenting a play that is very much set in a colonial world that does not respect this same history. After a comedy festival where the same performative recording was used before every show, this was refreshing and heart-touching.

The second was the online programme. I’m a sucker for programmes, but outside of the big musicals, where they scrape every cent off you to access it, we don’t get to see many well-designed and interesting ones. So Eleanor Cooney, Joslyn Nguyen, and Ava Toon should be praised for a small but important element of productions that really can add to our enjoyment of a show.

Not enough people from Melbourne take the short trips out to see theatre, and certainly not enough realise just how high quality theatre is in our universities. You might have read Away a long time ago at school. You may just like Australian theatre. Whatever draws you to those depictions of 20th century Australian suburbia, it should draw you to MUST’s insightful production of Michael Gow’s Away.

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