People disappear all the time. Ask any policeman. Better yet, ask a journalist… Many of the lost will be found, eventually, dead or alive. Disappearances, after all, have explanations. Usually.
– Diana Gabaldon, Cross Stitch
Since it first
appeared in Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, the story of Picnic at Hanging Rock
has been seared into our cultural conscience. Following Malthouse’s
production earlier in the year – an adaptation of Lindsay’s novel, rather
than of Peter Weir’s film – Sarah
Goodes brings us Angela
Betzien’s The
Hanging, a contemporary take on the missing child story that has
haunted us since the earliest days of white settlement. You can see it in the
paintings of Frederick
McCubbin, the claustrophobic vision of the untamed bush all around us, the
impossibly high horizons and tiniest glimmers of sky too far away; you can see
it in Picnic at Hanging Rock, Top of the Lake,
and The Kettering
Incident; in Hilary Bell’s Wolf
Lullaby and The
Splinter, in Jasper
Jones, When The Rain Stops Falling;
in the disappearances of the Beaumont children, Azaria Chamberlain and, more
recently, Madeleine McCann. And while these events are in no way connected,
they each capture our imaginations, and fuel our insecurities about possession,
sexuality, colonialism, and our (lack of) control over nature.
Betzien’s play
follows her recent plays Mortido
and The Dark Room in the
crime genre, and Children of the Black Skirt
in her exploration of the Australian Gothic trope, and manages to combine the
two genres within the frame of a crime thriller which owes several obvious
debts to Picnic at Hanging Rock, as
well as The
Virgin Suicides, Heavenly Creatures, The
Secret History, and The
Catcher in the Rye. These nods do not detract from the story, nor the
revelations and their ramifications, but act as a series of refracting mirrors,
to bounce ideas and references off each other to create a new work that ripples
with secrets, latent sexuality and its potency, as well as capitalising on the
eeriness and terror of the Australian bush that has haunted our national psyche
for centuries.
