Drama Theatre, February 21
6.5/10
Joan Lindsay’s fantastical 1967 novel told of colonial Australians trying to tame a land they didn’t understand, and which therefore seemed hostile. Two schoolgirls – a charismatic and a swot – invaded Hanging Rock with a stitched-up teacher and were consumed: unknowing sacrifices to an insatiable god. When people disrupt this world, they become vermin, and will be eradicated.
Tom Wright took Lindsay’s book, set in 1900, when virtually all the known world consisted of colonies and colonisers, and imagined it as a staged poem. Five women in school uniforms appear, spread across the yawning Drama Theatre stage, and tell us of Appleyard College’s girls being treated to a picnic at nearby Hanging Rock on St Valentine’s Day. We meet the characters, but in a second-hand, narrative way: among Wright’s methods of invoking remoteness.
Already you feel a tug between Wright’s text and Ian Michael’s Sydney Theatre Company production: the former seeks to allegorise the story, while the latter leans closer to naturalism, and the dichotomy jars. Partly it’s due to the inevitable effect of actors without inherently commanding voices being told to play schoolgirls, and partly it’s a matter of staging.
The scenes in this production that work brilliantly are mostly between Olivia De Jonge’s Mrs Appleyard, the strict, English, increasingly brandy-reliant headmistress, and Masego Pitso’s Sarah, the school’s orphaned, arty, victimised non-conformist. That Pitso is black lends a piquancy to Appleyard’s bullying, and here the more stylised acting brings both the characters and their relationship into sharper focus.
Too much of rest of the production lacks this daring; cries out for more of the acting and staging to be attuned to the language’s mystery, disorientation and alientation. Perhaps it should have been played in slow motion, as Steven Berkoff’s National Theatre production of Wilde’s Salome was to such unforgettable effect.
Kirsty Marillier is a charming Irma, the girl who seemingly returns from the dead, and also plays a baffled copper. Lorinda May Merrypor and Contessa Treffone complete the cast, and between them the five cover 17 roles, with only changes of voice or removal of hats to offer clues.
Michael somehow had to find a way for the performances to match the sense of wonder implicit in Elizabeth Gadsby’s set, which has a vast white oblong frame hovering ominously above a stage without a rock. Shapes such as a bowl of hydrangeas, parasols and hats echo each other, emphasised by Trent Suidgeest’s lighting against the stark black background. James Brown’s music, meanwhile, emphasises the supernatural elements, except when its creepiness and volume are ramped up to a histrionic “11” on the dial, when a “five” was all that was required.
Nonetheless, Michael does catch the sense of the invisible Rock weighing on all who survived the picnic: weighing on them in such a way that suggests perhaps the three who disappeared were the ones who got off lightly.
Until April 5.