Away Literary Elements

Drama

English

Australia - December 1967 and January 1968

As with most plays, there is no uniform narrator or point of view in the drama. Rather, "Away" treats us to a series of scenes, presented objectively and without commentary, that focus on the interactions between its central characters. This allows the drama to feel more realistic, and it also allows readers/viewers to come to their own conclusion about the play's action.

The tone and mood are mostly serious and dramatic, but at times, the tone lapses into whimsy or contentment, like during the Act 4 play.

There is no clear protagonist or antagonist, though it might be said that Tom is the central sympathetic character and that Gwen and Roy are the central unsympathetic characters.

Since the drama focuses on the internal dynamics of three separate families on holiday, it might be said that the play has no major conflict and that the unique conflicts faced by each family are what drives the play. It seems, however, that Tom's illness and the conflict evolving from this situation take a central role in the play, changing Gwen's character at the play's end and driving a great deal of the inter-family dynamics.

The play's climax comes when the storm comes through and fatefully places the families in the same campground. At this point, the tensions within each family have reached their peak, with multiple public outbursts occurring in each family. Afterwards, the families are able to share their grief with one another and heal. The play thus follows a rather conventional dramatic structure of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.

The play has several careful examples of foreshadowing woven into its plot. For example, a particularly subtle moment of foreshadowing comes in Act 2, when Tom, speaking to his father about their upcoming trip, mentions that Harry once brought their tent to a hospital where Tom was staying. Though this is unlikely to garner any additional attention from readers on a first pass, it concretely foreshadows Tom having a life-threatening disease.

An example of understatement in the play might be when Roy attempts to console Coral over their son's death in war. By reducing their son's life to a price that had to be paid in order to maintain capitalism and democracy in Australia, Roy is unintentionally understating the grief that his wife feels (and that he likely feels himself) over the loss of their precious child.

Many allusions are made in the play, most of which serve the purpose of integrating readers firmly into an Australian setting. These include Bex, Pine-o-Clean, and Rinso. Other allusions are present too, including those made to different actors like Chips Rafferty, Kim Novak, and Laurence Olivier. Such allusions foreground the theme of performativity versus authenticity that underlies much of the play.

A lot of strong imagery is presented throughout the play, but perhaps the most strong imagistic work is done in Act 5, Scene 1. Here, Gow elides words entirely from the drama and simply relies on the tableaux struck by his actors to convey key information about the characters' reconciliation and healing. Each minor movement and expression takes on added significance here in a way that both defies key dimensions of modern drama while also reinforcing the performative essence that is central to the dramatic craft.

A somewhat paradoxical situation evolves when we are told that Tom is aware of his own illness and, furthermore, does not want his parents to know that he is aware. Seeing as his parents have gone to great lengths to keep this knowledge from him, the end result is that both Tom and his parents remain frozen in time, each party being unable to speak seriously to the other for fear of revealing their own secret knowledge.

Many striking parallels are set up in the play, and this is in great part aided by the same actors playing many of the drama's characters. An example of a parallelism that does not revolve around this fact, however, is the play's beginning and ending. The play is bookended by Shakespeare, with "King Lear" being read at the end of the play and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" being performed at the beginning.

Perhaps the clearest instance of personification in the play comes when the storm in Act 3 is produced by its attendant fairies. These fairies not only instill a dimension of the artificial or perhaps even manmade to the storm, but they also provide an element of the fantastic, which cues us as readers to take the storm seriously and see it as a truly climactic event.

The play makes strong use of monologue and soliloquy throughout. These devices allow us to see clearly into the volatile and complex emotional states of each of the characters (consider, for example, Coral's Act 1 monologue), and they also allow us to acknowledge the different ways in which characters change in response to the play's main events. Moreover, such devices emphasize the performativity of the drama, foregrounding the theme more easily in reader's minds and allowing them to raise their own questions about the nature of theater.