Reaching A Deeper Understanding With Every Turn

With nods to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear it's not surprising that Michael Gow's Away has been programmed by Bard buff Damien Ryan's Sport For Jove theatre company. Set in 1960s Australia Gow's tale tells of three families from three different classes brought together by adverse weather during a coastal Christmas holiday.

As a child Sarah Woods made her way south of Sydney each holidays to the coastal town of Bendalong. "At the beginning it was us and maybe three other families with a tent, and the local fisherman. It was an absolutely idyllic place and we kept going back there but every year there were more families. It certainly has that feel of tent city that we see in Away when we first get there — it's Christmas day, the first scene with Gwen's family, which dissolves into a terrible row. Sadly, I think that Gwen wants it to be fantastic, but it just doesn't got that way...

"That tent city, for me, is very reminiscent of Bendalong."

"I think she loves her husband and daughter enormously but sometimes it doesn't look like that."

Woods first played Gwen, the martyrish mother of an upper middle class family, in her third year as a student at Western Australian Academy Of Performing Arts.

"At that stage I was too young. Then in 2003 I did it with Railway Street Theatre Company directed by Mary-Anne Gifford, it was a beautiful production. The drama school one, I mean," Woods pauses for the words. "It was a nice production, but it was a drama school production. You got a lot of people playing people that they are not old enough to play really.

"It was fantastic in 2003 to play Gwen at somewhere around the right age, and now, you know, maybe I'm too old for it, but everyone says I look young enough, so that will do for me. It's incredible to come back to a play and a role that many times, but it's been fantastic because the play is really an Australian classic, and deservedly so."

Now an aunt with access to teenage nieces and nephews Woods is in possession of a whole new world of experience with which to colour Gwen in her third time in the role.

"Things like Jim calling Meg a handful, I mean, teenage kids are a handful! But it's also what's great about them. So even though I haven't had kids my experience with the teenagers I know and love has given me that. But also, just the weight of living, knowing how much things matter, the important things like people and love and family, because that's Gwen's journey really. She loses everything else and that's what she realises.

"I think she loves her husband and daughter enormously but sometimes it doesn't look like that. Unfortunately it just all comes out the wrong way quite often with Gwen, and it takes the incredible catalyst that is meeting Tom and his family, and finding out that Tom is dying to break Gwen open and makes her realise what she's got, which is everything."