Australian plays good or simply fortunate enough to make it from page to stage have historically tended to meet one of two fates: canonisation or, much more likely, limited production when still new and utter neglect thereafter. Independent Melbourne theatre company Don’t Look Away, established in 2013 under the artistic direction of Phil Rouse, specialises in exhuming the dead plays with which Australian theatrical history is littered. It’s a risky strategy that invites blanket criticisms – that plays are not revived for sound reasons, that new work should take precedence – but the company’s previous productions, such as its first, Alex Buzo’s satirical New Wave romp Rooted, have been generally well received.

The company has now turned its attention to Alma De Groen’s feminist, time-hopping The Rivers of China, premièred by the Sydney Theatre Company to warm reviews in 1987. Productions in Melbourne and Adelaide followed in 1988 and 1989, but there has been no revival since; Rouse, who directs here, discovered the play while studying at NIDA where, he notes in the program, it ‘buried itself deep in [his] psyche’.