Christina's World

Christina, in middle age, is obsessed by a desire to return to the house of her youth and the imagination she created there—a kind of second Eden of lost childhood and the Pastoral Dream. She succeeds in conjuring her young self, a hesitant and idealistic dream figure who gradually takes on the characteristics of a ‘real’ Christina—a contradictory, perverse, tragi-comic adolescent with a fierce egocentric life of her own.

But the house is peopled by malignant ghosts and terrible memories. In the end we are left with an enigma. Was there ever such a house? Was there a lover, a father, a mad uncle, a drowned child—or were they all nothing more than figments of the young Christina’s distorted imagination? Was there ever such a place as Christina’s World?

Christina’s World was commissioned by the Music and Literature Boards of the Australia Council. The first performance was given in the Everest Theatre, Sydney, on 24 November 1983.