Erin Bond is one of the new talents that Canberra Rep has been drawing on in its 2024 season. 

Appearing for the first time for the company in Michael Gow’s famous play Away, she takes on the role of Meg, one of the two main characters, opposite rising local actor Callum Doherty as Tom.

The director too, Lainie Hart, is also a kind-of newbie, a first-time director for Rep. But she brings to the rehearsal room her job as a psychologist, combined with a history as a leading actor, useful in directing a play about people in conflict and crisis.

Away, a popular choice for senior schools, is set in 1967. It begins with the end-of-school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream but soon switches to the north coast of NSW, where the protagonists turn up for a typical Aussie holiday, although their accommodation varies according to their means and status.

Meg and Tom have been in The Dream together and are attracted to each other, but are held back by class prejudices, which become clear when we meet her upwardly mobile parents, Gwen and Jim, and his English immigrant mum and dad, Vic and Harry.

Nearby, their headmaster Roy and his wife Coral are staying in a Gold Coast hotel, and are experiencing marital problems. What could possibly go wrong?

Central to the play are the two young people, Meg and Tom.

It’s no spoiler to say that Tom is dying from leukaemia, and indeed Rep will be fundraising for leukaemia during the play’s run. 

In Gow’s original version, the play finishes not with The Dream but with King Lear, as Tom, still alive, recites the words of Shakespeare, “while we, unburden’ d, crawl toward death”.

In a later production, Gow changed his mind and eliminated Tom from that scene, but Rep is bringing him back. 

When I catch up with Bond at Rep’s theatre, she’s just dashed across from her job as a receptionist at the AIS, which helps her live while pursuing an ANU degree in political science and philosophy. 

More into the leadership side of life at Burgmann College, she nevertheless has had quite a bit of theatrical experience in her home state Queensland and is glad to be back up on the boards.

Bond, at 20, supposes she’s about four or five years older than the girl she plays.

“Meg’s mum has projected her ambitions on to her daughter, wanting her to go to university then become a teacher or a nurse until she marries, but Meg wants to break stereotypes,” says Bond.

“She has an eagerness to know something else, but Tom [who comes from a different demographic] is about the last thing her mum wants.”

Hart’s background as a psychologist, Bond tells me, positively affects the way she directs – “she knows something about human beings and their sad condition.”

One of the saddest conditions is unconsummated young love, and Tom, knowing he will soon die, wants to experience sex.

But Meg sees it otherwise. 

“At 16, Meg is fighting so hard to be mature but not always making it,” Bond says. 

“Her first interaction with boys is just friendship, but she does see something interesting and different in Tom right away and there’s a level of caring in the characterisation.”

Not quite enough caring for Tom though. Towards the end of the play Tom, aware of his impending death, puts the hard word on Meg and she says no.

The scene sees Tom trying every ploy possible, including playing the illness line and promising to take a bodybuilding course, in the hope of getting her acquiescence. Meg says she’s afraid, but it’s Tom who’s crying.

Values may have changed since Gow wrote the play. To older audience members, Meg’s words, “stop it, get up what’s the matter? Maybe you’re cracked as well”, may seem callous, but to a present-day generation concerned with consent, it seems on-message. 

“Women are in so much danger,” Bond says. “It’s not wrong for him to want to do it because he’s a young boy, but it’s not okay for an individual to plead and not take no.” 

But there’s a lot more to Gow’s rich script than such matters, and Bond hastens to assure readers that and say the play is a joy to act in, because in between the seriousness and the conflict, it’s “rich with humour”.

Away, Canberra Rep Theatre, September 6-21.