Away By Michael Gow Characters

Understanding the Character Dynamics in Michael Gow's Away

Michael Gow wrote Away in 1986, and it quickly became one of the most performed Australian plays. The work follows three families whose lives intersect during a beach holiday in Queensland. What makes the character writing stand out isn't any single dramatic twist. It is the way Gow layers internal conflict against outward behaviour across different generations. The play runs on three family units. Each family carries a specific grief that the trip is meant to help them process. The first family centres on Ted and Roberta Bryant. Ted is a music teacher dealing with the suicide of his daughter. Roberta hides her panic behind rigid routine. They travel with their sick child, Lucy, who has leukemia. Their storyline is the emotional spine of the play. The second family involves Coral and Ray Brown. Coral is a schoolteacher going through an emotional crisis because her husband feels disconnected from her. Ray works in banking and struggles to express himself. Their daughter Jenny is a teenager caught between childhood and independence. Their storyline shows how communication breaks down in long marriages.

The third family is simpler but important. Meg and Stuart Wilson appear briefly. Meg gives advice to Coral about her marriage. Stuart provides comic relief without undermining the serious themes. Their function is structural. They exist to mirror and contrast the other two families. What actually happens when you stage or study these characters is more complicated than a straightforward reading suggests. I spent about three weeks analyzing the script for a production workshop last year. The problem I hit was that the dialogue often contradicts what the characters are actually feeling. Gwen, for instance, says she is fine while the stage directions show she is barely holding together. If you play the text literally, the scene collapses into melodrama. The workaround I found was to treat every line as having a subtextual opposite. When a character says something warm, I read it as possibly fearful. When someone is cold, I read it as protective. This flipped my understanding of nearly every scene. The text becomes a map of evasion rather than a map of expression.

Gwen's character deserves special attention. She is the mother dealing with her daughter's illness. On paper she seems strong. In practice she oscillates between fierce devotion and complete numbness. The script marks this shift through small details like her handling of objects and her silence rather than her speech. A performer or reader who focuses only on dialogue will miss the real movement of her arc. Another thing that catches people out is the teenage perspective. Jenny and Richard are not just supporting characters. Their relationship provides the play's hope. Their scenes are lighter but never trivial. The challenge with writing teenagers in drama is usually making them sound authentic without relying on cliché. Gow avoids this by giving them their own internal logic. They talk about ordinary things while carrying enormous emotional weight underneath. The contrast is what makes the scenes work. If you are studying this for a class or preparing for a performance, the standard approach is to chart each character's emotional journey across the three acts. That works, but it leaves out the relational dynamics. I recommend mapping who influences whom instead. Ted affects Roberta. Coral affects Ray. Gwen affects the whole group. The influence flows both ways, and tracking those reversals reveals more about the writing than tracking individual arcs alone.

One limitation of Away that often gets glossed over is its treatment of class. The characters are all middle class professionals. Their problems are emotional and psychological rather than material. This means the play works brilliantly for ensemble casting but less well if you want to explore socioeconomic tension. Other Australian plays handle that dimension differently. If class conflict matters to your analysis, you will need to look elsewhere or read Against the grain of what the text offers. The script is widely available through playscripts.com and major Australian publishers. Many universities also hold study editions with commentary. The full text runs roughly 120 pages in standard formatting. Productions typically cast between nine and twelve actors depending on how they handle doubling. Reading the play without context will give you a decent first impression. Adding historical context changes everything. Written in the mid eighties, the play reflects Australian cultural confidence at a time when local theatre was still establishing itself nationally. The characters carry that quiet optimism alongside real pain. Understanding that cultural moment helps explain why the play ends the way it does without spelling it out.

For practical purposes, the strongest tool for working with these characters is journal writing from their point of view. I had participants in my workshop write one page per character per scene. Not as an exercise in interpretation. As a way to surface what the text leaves unsaid. The results were inconsistent but usually productive. Some pages revealed patterns in the dialogue that had been invisible before. Others drifted into speculation that did not hold up under scrutiny. The exercise is worth doing, but it requires honest evaluation of what stays textually grounded versus what goes beyond the evidence.