The Drover's Wife

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.