Tarantino meets Deadwood in this full-throttle drama of our colonial past, written by the indomitable Leah Purcell.
Henry Lawson’s story of the Drover’s Wife pits the stoic silhouette of a woman against the unforgiving Australian landscape, staring down a serpent—it’s our frontier myth captured in a few pages. In Leah’s new play the old story gets a very fresh rewrite. Once again the Drover’s Wife is confronted by a threat in her yard in Australia’s high country, but now it’s a man. He’s bleeding, he’s got secrets, and he’s black. She knows there’s a fugitive wanted for killing whites, and the district is thick with troopers, but something’s holding the Drover’s Wife back from turning this fella in …
A taut thriller of our pioneering past, The Drover’s Wife is full of fury, power and has a black sting to the tail, reaching from our nation’s infancy into our complicated present.
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