Joy Watters reviews the theatrical adaptation of a classic Australian thriller.
Joan Lindsay’s 1967 mystical novel about three Australian schoolgirls and their teacher who vanished in the outback gripped the global imagination with the release of Peter Weir’s film eight years later. Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre with Black Swan State Theatre Company has brought it to the stage with a UK premiere in Edinburgh.
A dark grey box of a set with a strange off-kilter perspective houses the greater puzzle that is the story. It opens on a distinctly untheatrical note with five schoolgirls (in contemporary, not Victorian uniform) narrating in turn from the novel. The five are distant from the story, static as they tell of the 1900 Valentine’s Day school picnic to Hanging Rock.
This scene with the chorus is surprisingly long (the whole play is just 85 minutes without interval), but then the audience is plunged into the story as the chorus becomes the characters.
The cast of five, Harriet Gordon-Anderson, Arielle Gray, Amber McMahon, Elizabeth Nabben and Nikki Shiels, powerfully show the seismic effect of the vanishing on the other schoolgirls, staff and local community. Director Matthew Lutton plunges into the dark, dark heart of the story of the group of girls leaving the confines of the bastion of colonialism that is their boarding school for the great outdoors.
In this production there is no sense of the liberating power of the light and heat, which the girls greet with open arms before they vanish for ever into the ancient Australian landscape. Only one girl is found later, alive but with no memory of events.
Picnic at Hanging Rock runs until Jan 28 at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh.
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