In the 1990s, Michael Gow made a revision to Away that both shocked and angered some lovers of the play. Whereas the last lines of the play are traditionally spoken by Tom, Gow revised the play so that Tom is conspicuously absent from the final scene—implying his death from leukemia. When asked about his motivations for changing the ending of the beloved play, Gow said that, "it felt, to me, like Tom's function is over once the play he does with Coral is finished [...] maybe the last scene is some time later and he's, in fact, dead. And maybe the whole play is his dream... of what his ideal summer would have been if he could have changed those people's lives." To Gow, the true meaning of the play lies in the very human conflicts that it excavates, not in any definitive resolution to Tom's condition. Various stagings of the play, however, have chosen to either ignore or include the alternate ending to emphasize a specific point about the play—for example, some might include the alternate ending to put a stronger emphasis on the play's tragic elements.
Despite differing rationales for including or discounting the alternate ending, it is important to note the ways in which the two endings differ. For one, the alternate ending written by Gow substitutes the phrase "under the sun" for "under the trees" in the original. While the original seeks mainly to emphasize the importance of nature in both Lear and Away, it seems that the revised ending has a different purpose. By bringing back the sun, which is emblematic of the beachside Christmas experience, as well as Tom's unsuccessful propositioning of Meg, Gow in the alternate ending seeks to provide continuity with the events of the previous acts so as to make Tom's absence felt. Additionally, based on the detail of the light playing on the sea "as in a dream" present in both versions, the sun here also creates and foregrounds an emphasis that ties the fantasy of Tom and the sea to the scene before us in the schoolyard. Fantasy and tragedy are made to interplay here, and all because of a slight change in emphasis.
Another detail that differs between the two endings is who delivers the final lines of the play. In the original ending, Tom reads from Lear, and our knowledge of his impending deterioration makes these lines both poignant and triumphant (i.e., we know that Tom continues to fight for his life, so him being able to read the lines some time in the future is a kind of triumph). In the revised version written by Gow, however, Meg is the actor who delivers these final lines. This, too, allows us to notice Tom's absence even more strongly—after all, Meg is reading lines meant for a male actor, and Tom was the best male actor in the school. Moreover, the lines are about the topics of death and inheritance, so Meg reading these lines cues readers in to a deep awareness that Tom is dead. The tone is distinctively more bleak, and in some ways, more subtle. Perhaps most bleak is an alternate staging of this alternate ending, however, in which the final lines are read by neither Tom nor Meg. In such an ending, the fates of central characters are left open, and the constant flow of time that has taken both of them away from and out of the schoolyard becomes the primary emphasis.
