's Plays

Living aboard neighbouring boats in a crowded marina, Col, Baxter and Jackie are middle-aged fringe-dwellers. Each of them nurses secret wounds and anxieties, and although their vessels are ocean-going craft, none seems likely to ever leave the safe confines of the harbour. They are hiding from the world behind and beyond.

Two strangers in distress arrive at a farmhouse in the wheatbelt late at night. A woman is there, on the veranda of the farmhouse, frightened, alone. She greets the interlopers with a series of questions. What has brought these people together? What do they have in common? Why does a dried up river matter to all of them? These questions hang over the play. As the seemingly gentle story unfolds, we realise the depth of Tim Winton’s vision. The play tackles deep questions of identity, sustainability and community without ever offering easy answers. The woman on the veranda is Georgie. As readers of Tim Winton’s novel Dirt Music already know, Georgie is from a well-off middle-class family and although she has been transplanted to a hard rural life, she retains a sense of security, an understanding of her place in the world, only challenged by a loss that occurs before the beginning of the play. The interlopers are Bender and his sister, Mona. Ironically, Bender has the least sense of place; although he longs to identify with the landscape he is also terrified of its power. He has no traditional language and no real sense of belonging, but he has a profound sense of family—a dedication to his addled sister despite his horror and revulsion at her past. The past has a powerful hold over the characters in the present, as ghosts interweave effortlessly with the present and claim their reckoning. The ghost of Lu embodies the power of the past. At times, memories seem more potent than the present. Georgie, Bender and Mona cannot inhabit the present with any peace or clarity until they revisit and name their past.

Tim Winton’s third play is a haunting exploration of the way in which we try to own our dead, and the way in which they come to own us. Night time. A siren howls by, a phone rings, there’s a knock at the door. Adam and Mary Mans eld are reliving the night they find themselves standing by their son’s lifeless body. Jack was the victim of a car accident on the long road back to Perth from the family beach house down on the south coast of WA. A year later, Adam has sold the winery he used to own, but his trips down south are becoming more frequent. Anything to avoid Mary’s silent suffering. Adam regularly visits the roadside shrine where the crash occurred, still grieving and struggling to come to terms with what’s happened. One day, he is surprised by a brief encounter with June, a young woman he used to employ as a cellar hand on his winery. June knows her way around a vineyard and all about wine. She also knows a lot about his son, Jack. June climbs a locked gate and makes her way into Adam’s beach house where she finds him drowning his sorrows. There she begins to tell him her story. A story involving an encounter on a beach with Jack and his friends Ben and Will and the night they shared together. A story she needs to share with Adam – the story of his son’s final hours.