Interviews With Australian 10 Authors, Ch 3: Michael Gow's Australian classic

Tom Tilley speaks to Michael Gow.

TOM TILLEY:

Michael, thanks so much for speaking to us. Great to meet you.

MICHAEL GOW:

Same here.

TOM TILLEY:

Michael, where were you in your life and in your mind when you wrote Away?

MICHAEL GOW:

Well, '86, I just turned 30. So, I guess, I was starting to think, 'How did I get to be who I am?' and, 'What comes next?' And that makes you kind of look back quite a lot about those formative years, particularly, the teenage years. And, I guess, I was just kind of starting to assess those influences on my life. I'd been working as an actor for about eight years — professional actor. I'd written one play, which had been performed all around Australia, so I think, in my work as well, I was thinking, 'Who am I? What am I doing? What's next?' So it's very much a kind of looking back in order to look forward kind of play, I guess.

TOM TILLEY:

Yeah, when I hear you say you were 30 and considering those things, it makes me wonder whether you were being cynical about growing up because, you know, these families are kind of hopeless in many ways and it's kinda like you're laughing at grown-ups in the play. Was there an element of that?

MICHAEL GOW:

I think so. I think maybe that was why… Well, one of the reasons the play was successful is that it's… You know, when you're 30, you kind of finally have to say goodbye to being an irresponsible younger person.

TOM TILLEY:

Do you?

MICHAEL GOW:

I'm afraid so. Uh… Well, you can choose not to. Good luck. But you're starting to look at the grown-ups as well, and I think because it has both, kind of, generations in it, I think that's partly why it worked. And I think young people like it because it's told largely from a teenager's perspective, looking the range of offerings available to be an adult, which, in this play, aren't so good. But… There's no play or any work of fiction with happy people in it. I mean, what would be the point? I think one of the things I didn't put in the script at the beginning, because there are two Shakespeare quotes in the beginning from Twelfth Night and As You Like It, is the opening sentence of Anna Karenina, which is, 'All happy families are the same, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own specific way.' And that's very much, I think, the case.

TOM TILLEY:

Yeah, well, write Meg and Tom as the heroes. You're on their side, you instantly empathise with them, and see the world from their point of view.

MICHAEL GOW:

What's great about young people is that they're able to be blazingly honest, like there's wrong and there's right for young people and they see through crap. Whereas it seems that, for the adults in the play, it's been a process of somehow accommodating compromise and self-delusion, say, in Roy's case. It is banging on about the standard of living in Australia as a way of not dealing with his own grief. So I think kids instantly recognise the way they themselves see through their parents' kind of diversions and delusions and lying. And I think that's partly what drives the play.

TOM TILLEY:

It's interesting to hear you talk about Roy in that way, that he was so attached to material wealth and seeing that as a symbol of success, but, at the same time, dealing with this sad, long shadow of Vietnam and the loss that came with it. Does he represent something bigger about what was going on at that time?

MICHAEL GOW:

Oh, it's very important. One of the interesting things that's happened as any hit play, people have wanted to turn it into a movie from time to time. And a lot of people don't want to set it when it's set in the '60s. They rather… Because it's expensive to do period movies in this country. But as soon as you take it away from that era, it doesn't really work — it's very specific to that period. I think Roy's problem is that he's lost his son in a war, and if that happens to you, you'd desperately have to believe that it was worth it. Because to maybe believe that it wasn't worth it, and that he died for nothing or the wrong cause, is terrifying. And I think that's what Coral is questioning, is that, was this stopping the Communist menace in a country to our north… real? Did it work? No, it didn't. We left. And I think he's beginning to sense that maybe the war was not worth the struggle. And I think that hung over that whole generation during the '60s, right up to '75, when we all left. So I think he kind of, in a way, embodies the sense of 'our way of life must be defended'. But is it actually worth it? And I think his journey through the play is to suddenly collapse at the end and say, 'I admit that it may have been nothing.' And that is a tragic point of view to reach, but I think you have to be brave enough in the end to deal with that. And it was certainly the case. The Second World War, which was the previous one for us although there was Korea, was a much clearer struggle, and people were much more able to understand the notion of sacrifice in that war, but Korea and then Vietnam and then the world we now live in, where the war seems permanent and completely indefinable, it's a much harder thing to justify to yourself.

TOM TILLEY:

It's fascinating to hear you say that you make this link between Communism, fighting Communism, with, what, Capitalism. And then the only result that can indicate a victory in that war is material wealth.

MICHAEL GOW:

Whereas, in Meg's family, that's their curse, is that they're so devoted to keeping up with the Joneses even though the Joneses don't exist. They've got to have the new thing, the better thing and the cleaner thing all the time. Whereas the family across the suburb has lost a son defending that very, kind of, rationale.

TOM TILLEY:

One of the things I like about the play is the way you create these two layers. So, underneath the play is this really serious and almost sad theme of overcoming lost and dealing with grief, but it's overlaid with this kind of hilarious, ironic, cynical take-down or pot shots at these adults who behave in such seemingly irrational ways. Was it meant as kind of a take-down? Were you taking pot shots at these people?

MICHAEL GOW:

Uh, the same way that Barry Humphries was then, when he was at his height of… Edna Everage before she became a Dame, Patrick White's kind of sarcastic attacks on Australian society. I think it's part of the Australian… uh, kind of character to take, what you say, pot shots at people, but, I mean, Samuel Beckett said there's nothing funnier than sadness. And I think it always interests me to write humour that is a mask hiding deep pain, which, to me, is what the play is about. That's my memory of the era, is all of us being so blissfully happy in that long summer that was the '60s. But, behind it, there was pain and suffering and confusion and people were lost, and 'what is this all for?' That seemed to me to be what Australia was about back then.

TOM TILLEY:

And Gwen's an interesting character. To me, as a reader, you made her instantly hateable. She's mean to Tom and we instantly love Tom. Why did you create her in that way?

MICHAEL GOW:

Because I think she, to me, embodies the terrible… Um, what's the word? The inner ambivalence of people towards the lives they lead. She knows she doesn't want to go back to what she got out of but she doesn't really understand what it is she's buying into, so it's kind of blinded her to a whole lot of human reality, this notion that she's got a plan that she's going to stick to. But, in fact, it's the chaos of life that makes life life, and I think ridicule is a great way of dealing with those people. And she is ridiculous. She's almost over-the-top in her writing and it's always an actor's job not to make it too ridiculous. And I hope what happens is… I mean, it is based on fact. There were an enormous number of suburban housewives in the '60s and early '70s who were addicted to aspirin powders, to Bex. Because the suburban happiness that they all lived in was lonely, empty, monotonous, and it was very difficult for them to resolve those things. You know, it's women, they wanted more out of life but they weren't getting it at that stage and it was… I think, to me, Gwen sums up a whole generation of Australian suburban women who, if you finally dig down deep enough, there is pain and sadness there, and I hope she comes out of it, in a way, with some sense of maybe there's a better way to deal with things.

TOM TILLEY:

It's nearly 30 years since you wrote the play. So, do you think much has changed for Australian woman?

MICHAEL GOW:

In some way, yes, and some ways, no. One of the comments I get from young people studying the play, the most common, is they're fascinated by the notion of a family that has the same parents through their whole lives. There's so many more blended families and single-parent families now than there was when I was growing up. So I don't… I think it must be a quite different landscape and I think that's also what's fascinating to people, is to see this kind of perfect nuclear concept that used to work in a not very good way. But I think… I think in terms of, you know, access to work, women have greater freedom but I don't know that the freedom is total or equal yet, so this is just the beginning in a play of a process that's still going on.

TOM TILLEY:

The script explores dealing with loss in such a powerful way and I think part of that comes from this dual narrative that you set up where Carol and Roy are dealing with the loss of their son and then you've got Tom's story where he's about to die. What do you think we learn about overcoming loss from this play?

MICHAEL GOW:

I guess one of the things that interest me in a play, and it always has, is the tension between the mask we're all supposed to wear, which is, 'everything is fine and it's terrific', and what life is actually like. So, to me, the word 'closure', for example, is a ridiculous word and it's meaningless. And I think what the play is maybe suggesting is that you never get over loss, but you accept it and make it a part of what makes you who you are. And that's my own view, is that you're… In the end, who you are is how you carry the scars that you have, rather than pretending that it's all terrific and needing some sort of endless distraction or some kind of drug regime to make you feel better. One of the things the character of Vic is there to… I don't know 'teach', but remind us, is that loss is part of life. And particularly now, we're not meant to think like that a lot, the word 'death' doesn't get used, people don't 'die' anymore, they 'pass', which, to me, is what kidney stones do, or what you do in an exam. But this notion that life is precious because it ends is a really major theme in the play, and I think that's what… I'm not convinced about the idea of teaching but I think the experience is partly there and I think why people appreciate the play is that they come out saying it's not intuitive to accept that stuff but life can be richer and you can get on with it, and take what you've been through with you, rather than deny it or get over it or find closure.

TOM TILLEY:

Mm, and Coral kind of finds closure, but doesn't find closure, but the journey she goes on is fascinating. How did you come up with that, that way of her kind of breaking out and going away psychologically, and then coming back having dealt with her grief a bit more?

MICHAEL GOW:

It's the sort of crazy manipulation of the play that she manages to run into Tom. So that they are able to share something, which we never actually see that moment in the play, what he actually told her, but she seems to have gone from a position of complete despair to one of acceptance, at least. And she takes that back home to Roy, symbolically with a shell… as if to say, 'I'm out of this shell, I've somehow moved on. You need to, too,' and I think the silence of moment at the end is what works, it's because there's nothing to say except, 'Here I am, deal with this.' And he breaks down, that's the best he can do so far. But… She also is based on a lot of women from my life in the '60s, who appeared terribly together and glamorous and capable, but were falling to bits inside 'cause they weren't allowed to deal with a lot of stuff because their husbands were determined to keep moving forward in their career or their social positions. So it's very much based on that. And it's also one of the original images of Coral, was, um, Zara Holt, as she was then, Harold Holt's widow, because this is the summer Harold Holt disappeared in the ocean. And that image of her in a kaftan on the beach looking for her husband was a powerful one, and it seems somehow to sum up, to me, that period in my life, that there was this woman grieving with dark glasses and a kaftan, standing on Portsea Beach, and her husband was gone. So it does have that sense of solitude and you have to face the universe all by yourself at some stage.

TOM TILLEY:

You start the play with Midsummer Night's Dream and you end it with King Lear. Why did you use Shakespeare this way?

MICHAEL GOW:

I was working as an actor, I guess, when the idea first started to grow. And I was in King Lear, at Nimrod, as it was then. Um… And it was a great production and had Judy Davis in it and Colin Friels and John Bell, so it was a really kind of intense experience working with them. And we played it for a long time 'cause we toured it to western Sydney. So I got to hear it every night through the loudspeaker or on stage, and I started to think, 'How does this great play and the poetry relate to Australian suburbia,' which is where most of us come from. And so I had started to think about that, and then thinking about the summer and holidays and how we all go away and come back. And the Midsummer Night's Dream is like that — they go into the forest and get totally confused by Puck, putting the wrong potion on the wrong person. So that was kind of the basic structure of it. And then I basically ripped off a whole lot of other Shakespeare plays like As You Like and Twelfth Night that involve people being shipwrecked or lost in forests or retreating into the forest to find themselves. And they're all quite… Well, Twelfth Night is quite a dark play, but they're comedies. But part of the action of the play is to go from the fun of the dream to a sense that something darker is coming, which is what Lear is, it's the kind of storm on the horizon. And Lear is like… It's my favourite Shakespeare, and it's the bleakest thing he wrote, 'cause its view of the universe is really dark, but it suggests that, in the end, that what… Particularly, a lot of teachers say, that it's about restoration and people finding themselves again. But, to me, it's also a play in which, beyond the play, there's something even worse coming. So I wanted to end it with his biggest, hardest tragedy.

TOM TILLEY:

With Tom crawling towards death.

MICHAEL GOW:

Yes. And when we came… I directed the play at the Sydney Theatre Company somewhere in the '90s, and I changed the ending of the play, which caused a lot of… anger. When a play is set for study, it's really difficult to say, 'Oh, actually, maybe that wasn't right'. But I've left it open and people can choose whichever one they do, but, in a sense… it felt, to me, like Tom's function is over once the play he does with Coral is finished and maybe the last scene is some time later and he's, in fact, dead. And maybe the whole play is his dream… of what his ideal summer would have been if he could have changed those people's lives. And sometimes in productions… it's Meg that says the last line, quoting the speech from the beginning of King Lear. But whichever way you do it, it is very much about the fact that until you'd come to accept those big issues in life, you're ready enough to move ahead.

TOM TILLEY:

It's fascinating, and what you're talking about there sort of really goes to the heart of the style of the play as well, that it jolts around from time and place, and it's fantastical and potentially a dream sequence, but it's open to interpretation. What is it that you love about breaking away from a simple, more linear, naturalistic kind of work?

MICHAEL GOW:

Same reason I love Shakespeare — you can do anything. You can just walk on stage and say, 'So, we're in France,' and you're in France, and I love that kind of magic that Shakespeare had available to him. And I often find myself a bit bored when a play starts and there's a lounge room or an office and you know that's it, or the kitchen, and you know that's it for the night, you're not gonna go anywhere else. I like a big, bare stage where you have no idea what will happen next. I find that's what's most appealing to me in theatre. And I think most of my plays have that sense of 'you can make up the next thing' as long as it's not too outside the rules you've set up. I love that freedom. That's what it is for me. It's the difference between film and television, and theatre is you can do it with nothing and just tell the audience where you are and say, 'Come with me, we're going on this ridiculous story.'

TOM TILLEY:

So what's it like for you, almost 30 years since you wrote this play, to know that it's still being studied right now in Australian high schools?

MICHAEL GOW:

Um, very… strange, in a way, because it was written in a hurry, it was actually… The trigger for it was a play that was meant to open the 1986 season at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney didn't happen, and the writer didn't deliver it, and I was asked, 'Can you write something?' and it was, like, four weeks away from rehearsals, and I did. And the pressure was what got it to the shape it is in. So, this thing that I remember writing in a daze, and it's now studied and it's considered a classic and all that stuff. And it's very nice because… you know, all writers want to be remembered forever. All artists want to have some sort of immortality, and it's nice that it's lasted, and it's nice to get royalties from it from time to time. But it's also a bit double-edged, I suppose, as a sword, because you don't write things to become canonical or to be studied and torment school students at exam time with. That's not any writer's intention. You have no idea of where you're going. You just follow the voices and hope that it works. So I kind of look at it and think, 'Oh, well, OK. Um… that's great.' But I always tell students that that's not why I wrote it, and I usually apologise, if I'm asked to talk to them, for making study anything. Um, because that's not the intention. They should always approach it as this accident that ended up being written, like all great work. And to kind of appreciate it and to criticise it, 'cause, you know, some of it's not as good as it could be, probably, and not to treat it as a sort of sacrosanct thing, but as a thing that happened and to… enjoy it, which is the thing that always makes me relieved, is that I hear that people enjoy studying it and putting it on. So that's, in the end, why… I guess, playwrights write plays, is that they, I hope, that people get some pleasure out of staging it and enjoy that experience.

TOM TILLEY:

Is it kind of weird for you, as the creator of this play, to have people, you know, looking at it and reading into in their own way and finding all these neatly constructed themes? I mean, did you write it with that in mind?

MICHAEL GOW:

Well, no writer writes that consciously. You don't go, 'I'm going to write a play about loss, war, unresolved grief, and, maybe, growing up.' OK, and then you hit the 'shift' or 'alt', 'F' key and then out it comes. Um, no-one ever does that. It's only in retrospect that the writer might go, 'Oh, this is what I write about.' And it's for other people to talk about. So I really… If that happens, I tend to stick my fingers in my ears and go, 'Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma,' because it's of no consequence or interest to me. And I'm happy for people to do what they like with it and find what they like, as long as they can prove their argument and make a case. Any work of art, is that you can… It is a relationship between the person watching it or directing it or performing it and the script and the reader or the audience. Is that… is that interpretation is important. You shouldn't just be handed it and go, 'It's this.'

TOM TILLEY:

Kids are doing it now right around Australia

MICHAEL GOW:

Sorry.

TOM TILLEY:

And you're very apologetic.

MICHAEL GOW:

Yeah, but… yeah. It's… I suppose it's also based on… You know, when I was at school, and you have to study… We studied King Lear and Antony And Cleopatra and, I think, The Merchant of Venice, and it was so boring and so, kind of, dull. And you'd read scenes and the teacher would write, 'Conflict is the essence of drama,' on the blackboard. You'd think, 'What does that mean?' And the themes of Antony And Cleopatra, empire, and what… That doesn't… That, in itself doesn't… What matters is the experience of the text and reading it and discussing specific passages. I guess that's… I hate generalised waffle. I can't stand that. I like people to go, 'This speech says… life is difficult. This is what this scene is about.' That's what matters to me, is the detail. 'God is in the detail,' whoever said that was right.

TOM TILLEY:

Michael, great to meet you and hear speak so eloquently about this work. Thanks so much for your time.

MICHAEL GOW:

You're welcome. Thanks.

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