MEG: "Still waters run deep. My father's always saying that."
TOM: "Still waters stink."
In this excerpt, Meg suggests to Tom that his quiet demeanor might suggest a more passionate or soulful attitude, but Tom rejects this entirely by saying that people of placid bearing are often disingenuous. We learn that this rings true with someone like Coral later in the play. This quote is thus significant because it represents an effort by someone with the clarity and cynicism of youth to dispel pretense and airs from his interactions, something which the play itself strongly advocates. Still waters can't run deep, Tom suggests, if they only appear still on the surface.
Their legs and arms painted gold. And that boy's hair, so black. And his smile. "What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?" Is it better for them to die like that? Looking like gods? Burning, gold, white. What's the word they always say in those plays? Alas?
In this monologue, Coral wonders whether or not it is better for people to die young, while they look beautiful and close to the divine. What she is implicitly gesturing towards, however, is the grief she feels surrounding the loss of her own son in war. On a surface level, this quote is thus important because it foreshadows and prefigures Coral's obsession with youth and death. At the same time, however, it is also important on a deeper level because of the underlying claims about drama and performances. Here, Coral learns from drama and directly appropriates its language in order to performatively express her own grief, though no one is listening. Gow here thus frames drama as instructive and powerful when used to convey one's authentic feelings, though the ironic tension between authenticity and performance is also felt strongly here.
Even if it is slow, if you could try and still have a good time, look like you're having a good time. I'm asking this for your mother. It's for her. Let her see you really enjoying herself, having a terrific time.
In this quotation, Harry tells Tom to act like he is enjoying himself, even if he truly isn't, for his mother's sake while the family is on vacation. On a deeper level, however, this quote is significant because it represents early evidence of Vic and Harry's deception of their son, as well as Tom's knowledge of this deception (based on his responses). Compare this quote also to Vic's nearly identical, yet reversed, words to Tom when she encounters him later in Scene 4.
Please, please stop doing it to me. I didn't send him. He had to go. Would you rather not pay the price for the life we have? We could just lie down in the street, defenceless, and let whoever wanted to come and take what we have. Would that have been better for you? Would you have been happy then? Jesus, Coral, you're too selfish. We were picked out to pay. I can't help that. We've paid. I can't bring him back. So we have a duty to go on with what we have. Maybe we should even be proud? We're living in a country with one of the highest standards of living on earth and we have shown ourselves willing to defend that standard.
In this quotation, Roy is reprimanding Coral for her lingering grief regarding the death of their son in the Vietnam War. His death, Roy suggests, was not in vain because it allowed for greater material comfort on the home front of Australia. This quote is important, then, because Coral rejects this line of thinking throughout the play, realizing that physical and material possessions are unable to replace the important loss of a child, nor compensate for the heinously tragic loss of a young person's life.
We have a game we play every year. We sneak presents home, we hide them, we wrap them up in secret even though we can hear the sticky tape tearing and the paper rustling; we hide them in the stuff we take away, we pretend not to see them until Christmas morning even when we know they're there and we know what's in them because we've already put in our orders so there's no waste or surprise. And Dad always hides his in a pathetic place that's so obvious it's a joke and we all laugh at him behind our backs but we play along! You knew what was in that box. You left it behind. I want to know why.
In this quotation, Meg scolds her mother for what she perceives as a deliberate effort on her part to ruin the family's Christmas holiday. On a surface/plot level, this quote is thus significant because it represents the first moment of tension between Meg and Gwen where the former directly confronts the latter. On a deeper level, however, this quote is thematically significant for the way in which Meg cynically and directly unmasks the performative rituals that hold her family together. Away is a play that teaches us to critically re-examine such performances in favor of authenticity, and this quote is one moment that solidifies and underpins the play's central aesthetic claims.
I went round the back and as I went past the kitchen window I could hear her talking to someone. I stopped at the back door. She was saying what old Vivien Leigh said in Gone with the Wind — just before the intermission and the war's been on and everyone's dead and the house's wrecked and the crops burnt and she's scratching around in the dirt for some old potato or cotton or something just to feed her family and she stands up against that red sky and says: "As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again." I laughed, not at her but I was really bowled over, she was as good as old Vivien any day. She was really very embarrassed and so was I and we made a bit of a joke of it. But seeing her upset before made me remember that afternoon. "I will never be hungry again." It had that effect on a lot of people, that film. Old Scarlet standing in that field and wanting to rule the world.
In this quotation, Jim explains Gwen's motivations for acting as she does towards her family and others (i.e., overzealous, pedantic, and snobbish). Here, he paints a picture of his wife as a deeply vulnerable and traumatized woman, who wanted so badly to escape poverty that she let herself become a disingenuous actress. At this point, Gwen is more or less all bravado, acting as she thinks Scarlet O'Hara might in the same situation. This quotation is thus significant because it frames Gwen's repulsive behavior as a somewhat reasonable emotional response to her own past. By contextualizing Gwen's present in terms of her past and understanding what drives her, Jim gets at the authentic core to Gwen that is teased out by the play's end.
RICK: "Why do you want to see me?"
CORAL: "You're still alive. You're still alive and talking and laughing."
In this excerpt, as Rick and Coral discuss their ongoing fling, Coral tells Rick that she is drawn to him on account of his liveliness and youth—and, by extension, his authenticity. This quote is thus significant because it continues to underscore the play's rejection of pretense and performativity, but it is also significant for a deeper reason. Because Rick reminds Coral, at least implicitly, of her own son, we see in her attraction to Rick the lingering effects of her grief, bleeding into the realm of the romantic. Additionally, because the actor who plays Rick is the same actor who plays Tom, we see in Coral's desperate desire to hold on to Rick's youth a mirror image of Vic and Harry's attempts to artificially preserve and enhance Tom's fading youth.
We don't look forward. We haven't given up, no, no. That would be a mistake. We don't look back and we don't look forward. We have this boy and we won't have him for long. And whatever he does, that will have to be enough. The Chinese don't believe in being too upset when someone dies. That would mean you thought they'd died too soon and what they'd done up till then didn't amount to much. We will be sad, of course.
In this quotation, Harry tells Jim about Tom's illness and explains the accepting yet despondent attitude that he and his wife have taken towards the limits of their son's life. This quote is significant because it serves as a direct rebuttal of Gwen's way of thinking. Rather than constantly pushing someone to act in a way contrary to their own desires, Harry and Vic would rather take someone's life as it is, learning to assign value to things that might not be conventionally considered valuable. This, of course, directly reinforces the play's central claims concerning authenticity, but it also carries a note of irony in that Harry and Vic are simultaneously pretending that Tom is not ill, refusing to tell him the truth about his health.
CORAL: "I cannot walk. I am afraid."
TOM: "I will show you how."
Spoken during the play they perform for the campers on the beach, this line proximally refers to the ghost of the sailor teaching the woman how to walk again after being transformed into a mermaid by the god of the sea. On a deeper level, however, they speak to how Tom, knowing that he is dying of leukemia, is capable of showing Coral how to conquer the grief of losing her son in war. Just like the mermaid in the play, Coral has had to change herself for the man she loves, but Tom endeavors here to instruct her on how to return to her authentic self, allowing for her reconciliation with Roy at the play's end.
It is the struggle between man and nature, as well as between man and man, and between man and himself that make this, for me, his masterwork. And it is the power of nature, its participation in the drama, that made me bring you all outside to commence work on your text for this year.
In this quote, Miss Latrobe speaks about the virtues of King Lear, but in doing so, cleverly foregrounds several of the major themes of Away itself. Especially because Tom is not present in some versions of this last act, the fact that these lines are spoken by Miss Latrobe (also mentioned at the start of Act 1) both provides an aspect of cyclicality to the play while also potentially showcasing how much has changed over the course of the play. These lines thus serve as a particularly apt summarizing gesture on Gow's part.
