Word: gow
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...helped spawn, the '60s snapshot is remarkable for its ordinariness. Against a sand dune the young family sit: mother in straw hat and Dame Edna glasses; a bronzed, bare-chested father holding his knee; their son dressed in a tropical shirt squinting at the sun. The latter is Michael Gow aged 6, holidaying near Ulladulla on the New South Wales south coast, though that's about all the Australian playwright can remember. "In my memory, Christmas holidays went from about 1959 to 1970," recalls Gow, 51. "There's just this kind of weird dream...
...From that dazzle of sun and surf, Gow summoned up a classic of Australian theater. His 1986 play Away, which interwove the lives of three families holidaying on the coast during Christmas 1967, instantly hit audience heart strings. And in presenting young lives touched by the shadow of death, from cancer to Vietnam, Gow poetically dramatized a country's coming of age. "Another Australia emerges," dramaturg May-Brit Akerholt has written, "a country which is no longer an isolated island but part of an extended world...
...play?not only in its home country, where it is a staple of high-school reading lists, but also throughout Asia, North America and New Zealand. "Although a glossary of Australian idiom is provided in the program," noted the New York Times in 1988, "the pain and burdens Mr. Gow's characters carry with them really need no translation." And as a 20th anniversary staging by the Queensland Theatre Company and Griffin (which returned the play to its stage birthplace in Sydney last week) makes clear, the magic still carries. Under Gow's own direction, his characters effortlessly take...
...turn is being gently snubbed by the headmaster's aloof wife Coral (Georgina Symes). As the three families go their separate ways over Christmas?to camp, caravan park and Gold Coast resort, respectively?only to meet up on the same stretch of beach after a New Year storm, Gow miraculously captures the full weave of Australian baby-boomer society. Here the cultural reference points are Kim Novak, Chips Rafferty and Dame Pattie Menzies, and Roger Kemp's production design rings true right down to the box of Bex on the lino floor. But Away is more than just a nostalgic...
...playwright since, Gow has never sought to recapture the butterfly spirit of Away. "I have a short attention span," he says. Instead he wrote the stage equivalent of a fingers-up sign to the Australian Bicentennial with 1841, took an Edward Albee-esque look at modern marriage in Sweet Phoebe (in which Cate Blanchett made her British stage debut) and, most recently, had actors perform The Iliad in underpants (Live Acts on Stage). But it is as a director that Gow is now making his mark. As artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company since 1999, he has energetically championed...