The Lightkeeper
(2003)
Produced: Mainstreet Theatre, 2003
Awards: 2004 AWGIE (Australian Writers’ Guild) Award for Community Drama
Nominated: 2004 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
Published: Australian Script Centre
Jack Power, an ex-seaman, is a lightkeeper at an (unnamed) lighthouse on the South East coast (the ‘shipwreck coast’) of South Australia. The play covers his midnight to dawn watch on a stormy night. With a struggling ship in the near distance, Jack revisits the major events of his turbulent life and in particular his love for and loss of the widow, Agnes Mary Taylor ‘with your grave face and your sweet eyes and your manners’ and her six-year-old son, Henry.
REVIEWS
“A small, theatrical gem … a gripping, moving and absorbing dramatic experience.” Helen Thomson, The Age, 2003
“The romanticism, danger, loneliness and isolation of shipwrecks and coast life is effortlessly evoked … not to be missed.”
David Grybowsi, DB magazine, 2003
“Dramatic monologues have become part of the repertoire of classic Australian drama. Think, for example, of those famous tales from the 70s—Jack Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination, Ron Blair’s The Christian Brother and Steve J. Spears The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin … to this trio might be added Verity Laughton’s The Lightkeeper.”
David Hough, The West Australian, 2005
“ … suggests an esoteric power for theatre itself—to paraphrase Jack Power—that we might be free of the worst of things by the grace of hearing them.”
Mark Hopkins, Sydney Morning Herald, 2005