The comedy in the amateur night scene lies partly in the send-up of typical holiday camp entertainment, partly in the way the characters respond to it. The playlet performed by Tom and Coral is also funny, and stage directions such as ‘CORAL makes ship noises on a bottle’ and ‘She swoons’ specify the comic aspects of the performance. But the comedy is gradually undermined by the tragic implications until the scene has moved from tired jokes and a rendition of Pearly Shells accompanied on the ukulele, to Coral’s line ‘I’m walking, I’m walking’ to the tune of Mendelssohn’s Nocturne.

The structure of the dialogue works in the same way as the tone, emphasising themes and action. Short, quick lines, usually duologues, in which the characters respond to each other’s words without really listening to their meaning alternate with lyrical passages which reveal the characters’ feelings and inner lives. Repetition of words and phrases emphasises the emptiness of their social language, and of the personal language they create to avoid confronting what might lie beneath the surface meaning of the words they speak.

When confrontation does take place, the characters’ worlds fall apart. But it is a necessary destruction, bringing the characters together on a ‘magical’ beach to be restored and reconciled. Coral’s escape from Roy and the glittering Gold Coast hotel leads her to the healing powers of nature and Tom. Gwen, Jim and Meg are ravaged by the forces of nature on Christmas day, by a fierce tempest brought by the fairies of the school play – and Puck/Tom. The storm destroys a whole way of life as it tears at the family’s belongings; a way of life dramatised in the chorus of campers and emphasised by Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. (Richard Wherret’s Sydney Theatre Company production brought out the central role of Gwen in this scene by having her buffeted by the wind as she clung to her possessions. The fairies also appeared battered and torn, embodiments of the characters’ inner lives as they journeyed through the storm.) In the next scene the storm is replaced by the almost dreamlike stillness of a sun-filled beach and Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music.

The quest undertaken by the characters in Away brings them home to the same old world but with a renewed sense of reality. The characters have moved from the artificial lights of the school hall through the distorted landscape of Shakespeare to scenes set in nature. The more the characters reveal themselves, the closer they move to nature. We last see them under the trees in the schoolyard reading King Lear: ‘it is the power of nature, its participation in the drama’ which illuminates the ‘struggle between man and nature, as well as between man and man, and between man and himself.’ As Tom reads from the opening speech, he is setting his role in the play in perspective: ‘While we/Unburden’d crawl towards death.’

Sydney, 1988