From left: Ben (Will McNeill), June (Whitney Richards) and Will (Luke McMahon)
From left: Will (Luke McMahon), Ben (Will McNeill), Jack (Paul Ashcroft) and June (Whitney Richards)
From left: Ben (Will McNeill), Will (Luke McMahon), Jack (Paul Ashcroft), June (Whitney Richards) and Adam (John Howard)
From left: Will (Luke McMahon), Ben (Will McNeill), June (Whitney Richards) and Jack (Paul Ashcroft)
A Word from the Director
Shrine goes to the heart of parenthood. We love our children, we want them to fly, be fearless, daring, rise above the crowd, be the leader, take chances, and yet because we love our children we want them to be safe, fit in, take no chances, not stick their head out of the crowd, live forever, and never hurt themselves. Parenting is a delight and a terror; as a new father wrote to me once, it is like having your heart ripped open and filled with everything, love, joy, pain and terror.
Tim’s ability to bring a landscape to life and reveal the psychology of the inhabitants is unique. The vast array of theatrical vocabulary we could choose to bring his work to life is testament to his extraordinary storytelling skills.
Like every contemporary playwright, Tim plays with form, and he knows his stuff, employing the direct address of Shakespeare, the static devotion to language of more formal theatre with bursts of energy, and the brilliant shifts in form, moments of expressionism, heartfelt confrontations, battles with unruly landscape that shift into surprising embrace. Tim has given us licence to play and explore characters that don’t usually grace the main stage: surfers, privileged boys, underdogs, and dropouts.
In bringing this amazing array of characters to life, Tim has explored the idea of class and privilege in a society that likes to believe there is no such thing, and he has exposed our great fear. Why is it so hard to get our boys safely through being teenagers? Why is our landscape dotted with shrines to broken dreams and lost opportunities? Why is it so hard for us to talk about teenage deaths in cars without reducing terrible sorrow and grief to cliché? Tim never dictates how we view his work, but creates questions about us. He makes our fears and ambitions and desires mythological in our own landscapes.
Thank you Tim for your generosity, your grace and for your compassion for Australians from all walks of life. You can pay us no greater compliment than to give us the gift of your words. I hope you come back and play again soon.
Kate Cherry
Director
From left: Adam (John Howard), director Kate Cherry and Will (Luke McMahon) in rehearsal
A Note from the Set and Lighting Designer
I started the process of designing this production by looking at the landscapes of the coast, karri forest silhouettes, the shape of a headland meeting the sea, beach and sand dunes, the terror of road trauma.
Kate and I always knew we wanted to create a stylised version of those landscapes, to allow the language of the play to float in a transformational setting. I wanted to find a fusion of the shapes we were looking at and eventually arrived at a wave/sand dune/headland/winding road surface as the primary playing area.
The design needed to build towards the climactic moment in the play, so we end up with a stylised waveform, a cocoon of beauty, a void, unclear where the horizon ends and the water begins.
The long vertical shadows of the karri forest surround the stage – the distinctive shape of a specifically South-West Australian native – people can appear/disappear/linger in the shadows.
The karri tree with car wrapped around is the most naturalistic element onstage. A freeze-frame of the moment of impact, and the haunting image of the car being cut apart at the scene.
With a car in three pieces, it was a natural and evocative progression for the furniture of the car to become the furniture of Adam’s living room. It means the characters of the play are able to inhabit the car again, Adam and Mary sitting in the driver’s seat.
The right of the raked floor is detailed with cat’s-eye reflectors suggesting the road edge and framed with the reflector posts, which echo Jack’s shrine into the distance.
I was drawn to all of the textures of our locations: the wet, inky ripples of water; glossy car wreck; and the dry, gritty sparkle of the sand and asphalt.
Starting with a black sandpaper finish, the rest grew from there, creating a world of varied textures of black. The darkness of the set design was quite intentional, particularly for this play; it allows me to paint the stage with whichever colour and texture I desire. I can pluck the characters out against the dark void.
Trent Suidgeest
Set and Lighting Designer
Costume Designer Fiona Bruce
Set and Lighting Designer Trent Suidgeest
How We Remember:
The Rise of Roadside Shrines
It is a common practice in most cultures – and among adherents to the world’s major religions – to mark the final resting place of a person’s body or remains. But what lies behind the growing phenomenon of roadside shrines, whereby the places where people have been killed (or fatally injured) become semi-sacred sites? Does the comparatively modern trauma of violent death at high speed account for their necessity to grieving loved ones? And as well as being tributes to the dead, do such memorials double as warnings – even gifts – to the living?
Memorials created by the family or friends of road casualties usually take the form of small crosses or plaques, accompanied by flowers and personal mementos. It is also common to see street furniture and tree trunks transformed into shrines with the aid of flowers and wreaths. (A related practice has also sprung up in major capitals like New York, London and Amsterdam: if the victim was cycling when he or she was killed, a ‘junk bike’ will often be painted white and chained up near the site, as a ghostly reminder to passers-by.)
Roadside shrines are banned in some American states. They are subject to administrative penalties in Russia, have come under governmental attack in South Africa, and can be removed after three months in some parts of the United Kingdom. But people in Western and European countries around the world continue to erect them to mark the passing of parents, children, partners and friends – regardless of the legal postures of their governments. And in Australia, the practice has been conspicuously on the rise for decades, to the point where something like one in five road deaths are memorialised with shrines.
Roadside shrines reflect how Australians are increasingly taking ownership of the sacred. As church attendance in mainstream denominations declines, communities have largely accepted the proliferation of idiosyncratic memorials that have come about without the blessing or involvement of a church. It doesn’t follow, however, that the practice is necessarily secular. What our tolerance of shrines reflects is that it has become acceptable, admirable or even fashionable to publicly express a personal understanding of one’s spirituality. Whether or not Princess Diana’s fatal accident in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris was a catalyst, shrines are now part of how many Australians cope with loss.
In an interview for Radio National, one family revealed that they visited their father’s shrine every Fathers Day, Christmas Day and Anzac Day (he had been a soldier for nearly thirty years). When asked why they visited a makeshift memorial and not the formal one at the cemetery, their response was emphatic: ‘[We] won’t go out to the cemetery because that’s not where he is. He’s here.’
Roadside shrines attract the most controversy when they incorporate physical artifacts from the accident. This is the case with young men’s shrines in particular, as they often include wreckage, alcohol bottles, irreverent humour and personal messages hinting at hero-worship of the deceased. The personal significance of a shrine is always positive to its curators, but the ways in which shrines like these commemorate the dead make some people uncomfortable. Arguably, though, this is what respecting unique interpretations of spirituality is all about.
There’s also evidence that shrines can serve as useful road-safety reminders. Main Roads recentl
y surveyed public attitudes to them, and found two-thirds of respondents felt shrines encouraged them to drive more cautiously. (Other studies confirm that crash markers can dramatically reduce road deaths.) In this way, shrines are not only public expressions of private grief – they express the hope that the living will learn from the dead, and so may add to the good of all.
Nick Maclaine
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges reference on page 30 to ‘Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer)’, Maurice Williams, 1960. The quote on page 54 is from Charles Birch, Feelings, UNSW Press, 1995.
Photos and videos provided by Black Swan State Theatre Company. Photos by Gary Marsh Photography. Video by Lush Digital.
About the Author
Tim Winton has published twenty-six books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). His plays have been staged in most Australian cities, and theatrical adaptations of his novels have been performed in the UK, Ireland and the US. He lives in Western Australia.
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2014
Text copyright © Tim Winton 2014
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ISBN: 978-1-74348-593-4
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Tim Winton, Shrine
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