Audience members for The Aspirations of Daise Morrow will not be in the Playhouse's normal seats. Instead, they will be seated on stage, as the events of Patrick White's story unfold around them and the members of the Zephyr Quartet perform their original score live. There will be a large piece of canvas hanging overhead, representing the Australian sky. This will be the first time the production has been performed in a proscenium-arch theatre  - until now it's been staged in black-box theatre spaces. This tour begins in Canberra before going to Wollongong and then overseas to Ireland and Scotland.

Director Chris Drummond, the artistic director of Adelaide theatre company Brink Productions,  says the intimate style of presentation - 250 to 300 people at a time - gives the audience members something they don't get every day.

"You can feel like you're within the play," he says.

Drummond says this adaptation of the final story in White's 1964 collection The Burnt Ones presents the story's entire text, the better to capture White's voice.

"Patrick White was one of the great writers of the 20th century," Drummond says, likening the Australian writer to William Shakespeare in his poetic style, big ideas and use of the Australian vernacular.

"It's a fusion of really extraordinary writing and thought through Australian ideas - it's very, very powerful."

The four actors - Paul Blackwell, Lucy Lehman, Genevieve Picot and James Smith - alternate between playing various characters and narrating sections of the story, using bits of costume, props and vocal and physical shifts to move between different roles.

"The plot is simple - it's a story that deals with life, death and love,"  Drummond says.

In the suburb of  Sarsparilla, Wal and Mum Whalley are getting ready for a day at the dump in the "bits and pieces trade",  searching for suitable items of scrap to sell. Meanwhile, at the adjacent cemetery, the Hogbens prepare to bury Daise Morrow, the scandalous sister of Myrtle, the family matriarch, who is married to town councillor Les.

Divided by class and experience, the two families don't get along and harsh words are exchanged but the Hogbens' daughter Meg and the Whalleys' son Lum both slip away and have an adventure together - including a kiss.

There are also flashbacks where Daise is seen in life, including with Ossie, the older man with an intellectual disability she took in, causing a scandal.

"It's a very Patrick White-style story," Drummond says, "a very real, very funny, human story."

Being set in the 1960s it's a somewhat more innocent age, just on the cusp of big changes, he says.

And while White indulges in his love of depicting the grotesque in some of the characters, he says, there's also humour, insight and genuine affection for them, too.

James Smith,26, was part of the development process of the work two and a half years ago  as well as the initial Adelaide season. He plays two of the characters, and while he wasn't faced with the challenge of gender-bending, unlike some of the other actors, he still had plenty of preparation to do, as  neither of the people he plays  is close to his age. He plays Lum, the young teenager, and Ossie, the old man taken in by Daise.

Smith found White's descriptions useful in building each of the characters. In one section, Lum is described as "vibrating like comb paper amongst the camphor bowls" so Smith made sure the boy was always full of energy, even when sitting down.

The character also carries a pocket knife he uses to carve "I love Meg" into a tree which Smith says was "a nice little anchor for me playing him".

He could also relate to Lum on something of a personal level: growing up as a country boy in the Gilbert Valley in South Australia he says he was always climbing trees and having fun.

"I could identify with Lum in that way."

As for Ossie, who had suffered from meningitis, one of the keys was the line "nothing could stop his nose" - "He has a runny nose, it's a problem all the time; it's a lovely outline you can dab in."

He says that White has "a really good sense of humour" about the xharacters but "never seems to let anyone off the hook too lightly", treating both the families with a fairly "acidic" touch, saying White is both harsh and loving, with a particular regard for "salt of the earth" types and an ability to pinpoint people's personalities and foibles.

"You can tell by his writing he knows these people."