Honour

Honour

By Joanna Murray Smith

Directed by Karen O’Neill

An amateur production by arrangement with Nick Hern Books

George and Honour have been happily married for thirty-two years.  She was a successful poet; he is a respected journalist and columnist. Both are attractive and sophisticated, intelligent and intellectual.   They are a middle-aged, middle-class couple with a perfect understanding of each other.  Their daughter is graduating from university and they’re ready to move on to the next stage of married life.  Then an ambitious, young, female journalist – assigned to ‘profile’ George – undermines their relationship and their understanding of each other.  The fallout is distressing for their daughter, while George and Honour question what they have individually given to their marriage and what they expected in return.

Honour was first performed in Melbourne in 1995. It received its UK premiere at the National Theatre in 2003 and was revived in the West End in 2006 and most recently at the Park Theatre in 2018.  Its themes – ambition, sacrifice, infidelity, sexual control and the casual cruelty of youth – are timeless but for Joanna Murray-Smith the play was firmly set in the 1990s.

However, when revisiting the work for an Australian revival in 2021, she realised Honour was still relevant.  “Women are still giving up their careers in order to support and nurture their husbands and their children, and middle-aged men are still leaving their wives for younger women,” she says.  “Perhaps all that has changed is the nuance: that women are a little bit more wise to what they are forsaking when they make these sacrifices.”