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Gwen In Purgatory — acclaimed Australian playwright Tommy Murphy’s new work — is the story, I suspect, of every family. Or is it just mine? It’s chilling. Funny, very funny, in the worst possible way, in that the behaviours, personalities and situations are likely to jog memories you’d hope were dead and buried.

“Stubborn” and “fiercely independent” is how 90-year-old matriarch Gwen’s neurotic daughter Peggy describes her. Gwen’s offspring have managed to convince her to move out of her old home and into a brand new place. She’s still as sharp as a tack, much to the chagrin of her family, who have their own problems and agenda. Not that Gwen is ripe for beatification. She can be quite cruel, cutting and seemingly oblivious to such.

Gwen has been alarmed by the threatening appearance of the bloke whose ute she clipped on the way out of the driveway, but grandson Daniel has managed to subdue the bloke’s outrage. We learn Daniel’s is having trouble with Belle, his partner, who’s taken off to Forbes, to be with her family, who she can’t stand. Caught in the middle is their daughter, on whom Daniel clearly dotes. It’s also revealed he once tried to rob a local service station, but the owner saw through his mask. Later, the reluctant victim offered Daniel a job. It might be an unlikely and therefore comical scenario, but life is so often stranger than fiction.

The premise, in a sense, for all the action that swirls around her is the fact that Gwen is desperately seeking to play one last game of tennis on the rundown court at her old home. But it’s too late. Ground has already been broken by developers. She’s all dressed-up, in her white clobber and sunshade, with nowhere left to go. Game over. Soon, the final bell will toll.

The play is dense with dialogue, but none is superfluous. It all contributes to the narrative arc, as well as individual and familial characterisations, which couldn’t be more vivid. These are people written with such recognisability and authenticity, it’s scary. You’ll almost certainly feel like you know them. Probably all too well.

I can’t think of another playwright who’s a keener, more insightful observer of Australian suburban life, let alone one who can document it so redolently. Williamson is up there. Tunks has his strengths. But Murphy takes the cake. There’s nothing pretentious, evasive, cryptic or abstract. There are no laboured metaphors, excesses or self-indulgences: everything on the page is for a purpose and advances the play. And who better than director Neil Armfield to lift it off the page and realise it on the stage?

Gwen In Purgatory is a play for and about all of us. It is warm, funny, sad, tragic, poignant, moving and unsettling. Just like our lives. Life on the page, or stage, doesn’t get any better than this. This is the (very) real deal. Murphy makes it possible by writing it.

Armfield makes it actual, through his mercurial talent for finding just the right cast to hit exactly the right notes. In these actors, he couldn’t have done better. It would be almost utterly arbitrary to rank one above the other, but I will say that Nathaniel Dean (as grandson Daniel) has created a masterpiece: every movement and mannerism is believable and serves to communicate the fragile containment of his emotions. But it’s easy to feel sympathy and contempt for the other characters, too. Sometimes, perhaps, both at once.

Above all, Gwen In Purgatory manages to portray the beginning, middle and end that is, or will soon enough become, familiar to so many of us. It’s not happy. It’s not unhappy. It’s both. And neither. And a brilliantly incisive document of the quality, or lack of it, in and of our lives. And then some.

The details: Gwen In Purgatory plays the Belvoir Street Theatre until September 19. Tickets through the company website. The production travels to Brisbane for a season at La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre between September 29 and October 4. Tickets through the La Boite box office.