Theatre / Away. At Canberra Rep Theatre, until September 21. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

It’s always good to see Michael Gow’s Away return, with its vivid evocation of the late 1960s in Australia and its sensitive treatment of issues of life and death.

Three families set out on their Christmas holidays after the end-of-year school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has starred Tom (Calllum Doherty) as a Puck with a lot of presence. His parents Vic and Harry (warmly played by Elaine Noon and Peter Fock) are migrants from a grim post-war Britain and are keeping secrets from their son about his medical condition.

We never find out what role the sensible Meg (Erin Blond) plays in the Shakespeare but she and Tom form a bond that her uptight mother Gwen (Christina Falsone), a product of the Depression, rather objects to, seeing Tom as a no hoper. Her father Jim (Peter Styles) is more tolerant but the family tensions make a happy Christmas difficult. 

Then there’s Roy the headmaster (Jim Adamik), desperately trying to keep up appearances, and his painfully distant wife Coral (Andrea Close). They have lost their son in the Vietnam War and the stresses are huge. 

Yet despite the sadness, this is a play with much humour. Director Lainie Hart sprinkles the show with giggling schoolchildren and fairies and bombastically moralistic campers intent on seeing the beaches brought into order with amenities blocks, proper roads, concrete, and shops selling “beachy things”.

How this all resolves is best left to audiences to discover. 

The show is still settling in and needs to become more comfortable with its style. The music really needs to make use of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; in a 1960s school that would have been the go, on a record player or plunked out on the piano by the music teacher. 

But it has some strong performances and a growing sense of ensemble, at its core a powerful Tom in Doherty who (especially in the first half) darts around in the semi-darkness inviting the audience to enjoy the changes he oversees in the set. There’s a magic in Away that always comes through.