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'Marked by Winton’s signature ear for dialogue, these are three searing plays about survival, mourning, and the remarkable gift of redemption.
'Winton’s first play, Rising Water, sees middle-aged fringe-dwellers Col, Baxter and Jackie living aboard neighbouring boats in a crowded marina. 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.
'Signs of Life marks the return of Georgie Jutland and Lu Fox from Winton’s Miles Franklin–winning novel Dirt Music. Alone in her farmhouse at night, Georgie hears noises out on the highway – car doors, voices, weeping. Then a figure emerges from the darkness. A man seeking help. His sister is out in the car, screaming. Can Georgie trust them? And what to do when guests settle in and show no inclination of moving on?
'In Shrine, Adam and Mary Mansfield are struggling to come to terms with their son’s death in a car crash. Adam has sold his winery, and his trips to the beach house have become more frequent – anything to avoid Mary’s smouldering grief. One day a young woman arrives at his door. She has something to share: the story of his son’s final hours.' (Publication summary)
Contents
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Rising Water,
single work
drama
'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.
On Australia Day, drunk, lost and angry, a young English backpacker called Dee turns up on the jetty and her arrival unleashes chaos. Suddenly no secret is safe, nothing is fixed. As the nation celebrates, the cosy fantasy of safety from the past is blown open in a funny, bitter torrent of loose talk.' (Publisher's blurb) -
Signs of Life : A Play in One Act,
single work
drama
'On a farm that has been parched by a drought of apocalyptic severity, Georgie, a white woman in her fifties, lives alone quietly contemplating her solitude. One evening, the silence of the expansive, isolated property is broken by the sound of a car spluttering to a stop. An Aboriginal man and woman come to the door for help and reluctantly Georgie allows them into her house.
Recently widowed, Georgie is not looking for company. She wants to be alone to mull over her future but her mysterious guests, Mona and Bender, demonstrate an inexplicable reluctance to oblige her.
Author Tim Winton is a household name on account of a succession of celebrated novels but has only very recently turned his attention to writing for the stage. Signs of Life is Winton's second stage play and marks a continuation of the creative partnership he has forged with Kate Cherry, Artistic Director of Perth's Black Swan State Theatre Company.
Winton's dramatic writing has a great deal in common with his prose, stylistically and thematically. Echoing elements of Dirt Music and Cloudstreet, Signs of Life is a work of magical realism where the dead speak with and watch over the living. Gently paced and deeply searching, this delicate new work for the stage is as evocatively atmospheric as any of the author's novels.' (Source: Sydney Theatre Co. website) -
Shrine : A Play in One Act,
single work
drama
'"Shrine" is set above the rocky headlands of the South Coast of Western Australia, between a forest and the sea. It's wine country, and a privileged young man, Jack, has been killed driving friends back to Perth from his parents' beach house. Jack leaves in his wake a wreck of a father, a shadow of a mother, and the promise of a love affair that never quite happened. A year later, Jack's father Adam meets the small town girl, June, who shared a strange and life changing night with Jack hours before he died. Domestic heartbreak transcends into mythology in a landscape inhabited by ghosts.' Source: http://aussietheatre.com.au/ (Sighted 26/09/2012)
