Review: PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, Malthouse Theatre

Right before sitting down to this Malthouse Theatre and Black Swan State Theatre Company co-production of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, I discovered what little knowledge I had of the iconic tale was actually no knowledge at all. Growing up across the ditch, I had taken the turn of last century disappearance of three schoolgirls and their female teacher at Hanging Rock as fact. It was a fact that hovered within my understanding of Australia as a dangerous, other place. Not wild in the sense of the landscape (not as compared to my own island) but rather a predatory place, where animals, including the human kind, lurked everywhere from dry riverbeds to suburban train stations. It seemed completely feasible to me that four women could disappear without a trace, and that a fifth who escaped could be so traumatised by what she endured that she would never, ever speak of what happened that day.

I mention this because as the play unfolded, I spent a not-small amount of time feeling an odd kind of disappointment in discovering that Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel, parts of which are used to great effect in this production, is in fact a novel.

What we are willing to believe says more about ourselves than the story being told, don't you think?

Writer Tom Wright and director Matthew Lutton seem to have an acute awareness of their audience here, and what that audience brings to this picnic, their disbelief suspended or otherwise. This version is a reenactment of the events that famous Valentine's Day in 1900, an explicit mythologising of them. The play begins with five modern-day schoolgirls on a stark stage. They begin as chorus, and then slip seamlessly in and out of a multitude of characters, from the controlled, controlling Headmistress of Appleyard College to the luminous and lionised student, Miranda. The language is dense, evocative, and the five actresses are brilliant in their verbal relay, never once dropping the baton from one monologue to the next. Parts of Lindsay's novel are directly quoted throughout, and it is a testament to Wright's talent that, in a play so reliant on the rhythm of words, I rarely sensed a change in beat between his own and those that had been written before him.

This is a play requiring concentration, dealing as it does with two of culture's most fetishized subjects - adolescent girls, and the landscape that surrounds us. I was saved from drifting off into musings about symbols and metaphor - Colonialism! Homoeroticism! So many -isms! - by the clever, creepy scene changes. As we're pitched into sudden darkness, and the lights come back up on eerily different bodily compositions each time, we're reminded that this is a horror story at the end of the day. At certain points, lighting designer Paul Jackson achieves something cinematic in this small theatre, the kind of blink and miss terror that the best horror movies trade in, and the kind that makes you jump at shadows for hours after.

For anyone expecting a Peter Weir picnic, this is not your dreamy, billowing white dress affair. This is a dark, sometimes darkly comic, poetry slam of an afternoon at Hanging Rock. It isn't a perfect gathering - there are times when the dialogue verges on indulgent, and the trampoline scene in particular, the only time the players are active participants in setting up the scene, felt odd, too realistic, perhaps. But, for the fantastic, committed performances of the five actresses, the exceptional way lighting becomes its own character in the story, and a new way of examining an old, familiar tale, this is a rock and a mystery you want to explore.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

Malthouse Theatre

26 February - 20 March

For tickets and more information click here

Photo Credit: Pia Johnson

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