Title: Away
Author: Michael
Gow
Publisher: Currency Press
Publish
date: 1986
ISBN: 0
86819 2112
Another work I checked out because it’s on
the school curriculum. Year 9 in this case. And I’m finding it hard to control
intense irritation.
Not necessarily at the play itself, but at
its treatment by the critics.
Outline: set in 1960s Australia, four
families as representatives from varying classes, two of them currently with
teenage children. One family has lost a son to the Vietnam War, and the mum’s
gone not coping. One family is soon to lose a son to leukaemia. The background
is set with heavy reference to several Shakespeare plays: MSND, The Tempest, R&J, and (most inappropriately) Lear. Oh how literary. Supposedly, the
characters all find some kind of reconciliation and forgiveness at the end. There
are plenty of more detailed synopses kicking about it you want to know more.
Fine, so the use of the Shakespeare is
valid – just as any textual or other reference would be. It’s OK to use
valuable shorthand like that to pack a bunch of implications into a relatively
short space. I’m all for metatextuality.
But what, in the name of all that is
wonderful, is the point of cramming it down the gullets of kids, unless they
know the plays it’s referencing, backwards? Which I doubt they do, as the very
critics themselves miss most of the references and points. So far I haven’t
seen a single acknowledgement of the storm in the play (duh) being from The Tempest, and not MSND. Not even with the Ferdinand and
Miranda scenarios, the very name of the character ‘Coral’, the firewood…. The
list is too depressingly long to continue. But this is not the worst impact of
the critics.
The ‘reconciliations’ at the end are
utterly unconvincing. The kids are told that it’s ‘a play about forgiveness’.
Sure, just as The Tempest is a play
about forgiveness – kinda. Prospero doesn’t forgive, it’s just the easiest and
most practical way out, rather than massacring the offenders. Pity, exactly as
per Ariel’s ‘Mine would, sir. Were I human’, sure. Pity of the audience for the
characters. Not so much the characters for each other.
The play is about love, the kids are told.
Sure, just as much as MSND and R&J and The Tempest are about love. Love that means nothing and is an
illusion given and taken by arbitrary spirits and plant extracts. Love that is
inevitable simply from the circumstances the characters find themselves in.
Love that is grudging and possessive and exclusive and domineering. Having
schmaltzed out Shakespeare, I guess it’s not surprising that critics blindly
glaze Gow’s work in vanilla icing.
So what is the play really ‘about’?
It’s about selfishness. It is a good,
solid, insistent portrayal of selfishness.
The obvious characters scarcely need
explaining: Gwen, proud of her efforts to up-me-one on the Joneses; Roy, fully
prepared to lock his wife up and subject her to EST because she’s not upholding
his image as a schoolmaster; Meg, who’s perfectly happy to continue the selfish
curve her mother’s set. The critics rave about Tom’s family being salt of the
earth bona-fide lovvies. But all the parents (Vic and Harry) are interesting in
for the much-lauded anticipated holidays is for their dying son Tom to pretend he’s enjoying himself – for the
sake of the other parent. Why? They literally don’t care if he has a good time.
They know they’ll be left behind and need to deal with their lives and
consciences afterwards, and they need their other half to think that their
son’s last summer was spent enjoyably. Whether it was or not, is irrelevant.
They’re sacrificing their offspring just as much as Coral and Roy have to the
Vietnam War – so they, the parents, can have a better future.
So what about Tom? He’s talented and dying.
Some sympathy there? Nope. He uses Meg as nothing more than a self-aggrandising
instrument. Firstly when he gives her a present and makes it all about himself.
Secondly, and unbelievably, he tries to pull a Keats-and-Fanny-Brawne on her to
get a leg over. Seriously? And we’re meant to think he’s OK? Just because
you’re young and dying of leukaemia doesn’t mean you can’t be an arsehole.
The theme of selfish social climbing and
exclusion is by far the strongest throughout the play. The campers, the
presents, the segregation of the characters carefully into their social strata.
Insistent echoes of sacrificing the offspring for power and wealth dominate the
entire work. Tom, who is told to go on
holiday and show just how great his short life was, Rick who has willingly
submitted to being a mindless cog in the machine, Coral’s son who has been
offered up to the Draft, and the Shakespearean echoes of Ferdinand who is taken
away for his father’s transgressions, the Midsummer lovers who flee the
parent’s ire (‘on pain of death’)… nothing is left out. If we hadn’t got it by
the end, the ridiculous little Flying Dutchman/Little Mermaid playlet at the
end insists we notice that even the ghost
of the young man has to sacrifice his own well-being in the afterlife so that
the woman who loves him can have a good life (i.e. walk on land again – even
though it was her choice to throw herself into the briny). Sacrifice the
younger generation, step up on others and overcome, survive, don’t look back.
If you do, pretend it’s something else.
How much of this is actually acknowledged
by Gow is debatable. But that’s the point of a work of art. It might show
things the artist wasn’t necessarily aware of, or wanted to display. And this
central message certainly says something about a perception of Australian
society that isn’t the most pleasant. Perhaps that’s why the theme tends to be
ignored in favour of ‘reconciliation’, ‘love’, and ‘forgiveness’. Not once is
there any reference to anything Aboriginal, but their ghosts haunt the play’s characters’
bitterness and insecurity. I would posit that the play itself is a perfect
example of the ‘play-acting’ and shying away from reality so insistently
portrayed within the work itself.
All over, for itself, three and a half
hoofs up out of five. A poor man’s Beckett with a bit of kitchen sink thrown
in. Not too bad.
