Would you ruin someone’s life, separate them from their soulmate and their only son, all the time telling yourself you’re doing the right thing? Leaping back and forth between the 1920s and the 1980s, Good Works follows the lives of two women and their two sons as they struggle to cram their complex lives within the narrow confines of Catholic morality. By turns angry, incisive, tender and tragic, Good Works is Nick Enright’s most complex and most personal play.
‘Enright has fashioned an extremely complex, difficult and complex
play, emotionally charged, intellectually challenging. It is without
doubt destined to become a major work in the Australian theatre.’
Angela Bennie, Sydney Morning Herald, 1994
‘Nick Enright’s Good Works is one of the most moving, absorbing and powerful new plays produced in Sydney in a long time. It is an exciting work by an experienced writer who has finally found his personal voice.’
John McCallum, The Australian, 1994
‘It seems to me to be a play we have been waiting for for years now. Passionate, argumentative, yet thoroughly dramatic, realist in its concerns, yet dexterous in its use of symbolism… it is a stunning achievement.’
Guy Rundle, The Age, 1995