The secret history: STC’s The Hanging

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.

Extremely loud and incredibly close: STC’s Disgraced

First produced in 2012, Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced has the distinction of being the most produced play in the United States in the 2015-2016 theatre year. Set on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Akhtar’s play is the story of Amir, a high-flying lawyer at the top of his game who wants to be a partner in his prestigious firm. When he agrees to support an Imam accused on charges of funding terrorism, he finds his world and assumptions challenged, and rapidly slipping away from him. Following a long line of dinner-party plays where arguments and battle-lines are drawn, territories staked, and relationships forged, broken, destroyed, Akhtar is clear to demarcate his characters’ points of view, but it lacks the spark which would make this play a fierce critique of our current socio-political attitudes.

Neither a woman nor a man: STC’s Orlando

Often cited as the world’s longest love-letter, Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando is a fictional biography of Orlando, an Elizabethan youth who wins the favour of Queen Elizabeth I, and through good fortune and a dash of incredulity, lives across centuries, barely ageing a day in the process; following a sex-change in Constantinople, she (“for there can be no doubt about her sex”) returns to England a woman, only to find the deck of cards is stacked against her time and again, until Woolf’s novel finishes in “the present age” (i.e. 1928), when Orlando is well over three-hundred years old (yet looks little more than thirty six). Adapted for the stage by Sarah Ruhl, Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Orlando is directed by Sarah Goodes, and although full of colour and energy, it is perhaps hampered somewhat by a text which contains perhaps too much of Woolf’s own text and not enough of the playwright’s own dramaturgical landscaping to make it a truly effective piece of theatre.

Sarah Goodes and the leap of faith

When John Doyle’s play Vere (Faith) was announced as part of Sydney Theatre Company’s 2013 season, I leapt at the chance to become acquainted with director Sarah Goodes’ work. I had heard positive reviews from her previous productions at STC – Anthony Neilson’s Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness in 2011, and Hilary Bell’s The Splinter in 2012 – so although I had been unable to see both those productions, I knew of her work’s reputation as being generous-spirited, inquisitive, and compassionate pieces of theatre.

Since 2013, I’ve had the pleasure to see four of her productions, with a fifth – Orlando – about to open. Following the end of Battle of Waterloo’s run, I sat down with Goodes for a discussion about her work as an independent theatre-maker and as a Resident Director at STC, the importance of new work, the role of a director, and the seriousness of playing.

Waterloo now: STC’s Battle of Waterloo

A new play is always an exciting occasion, a debut play even more so. Kylie Coolwell’s Battle of Waterloo is a contemporary study of life in the James Cook tower in Waterloo’s housing commission estate. Begun in 2012 as part of Playwriting Australia’s Redfern Playwriting Salon, Coolwell’s play depicts the life of a family over the course of a week, in all its bloodsweatandtears, and shows just how important – how beautiful – the sense of community is in one of these residential towers.

Produced by Sydney Theatre Company in their Wharf 1 theatre, the space is filled with Renée Mulder’s ingenious set. Reminiscent of Bob Crowley’s set for the recent revival of David Hare’s Skylight, it manages to convey an intimate interior and towering exterior all at once, and seems to be a physical evocation of a line from C.S. Lewis – “there is an extraordinary charm in other people’s domesticities. Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else’s garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens.” While we see Cassie and her family in their little flat, marked out on a series of low platforms with walls and doors – complete with balcony – around them, we see the little strip of grass down below, the neighbours on their balconies smoking or breathing in the night air, little pockets of light in the dark theatre, and it is beautiful.

Murder, she wrote: STC’s Switzerland

This review appeared in an edited form on artsHub.

A sharp triangular fragment of a room – a lounge room, a roaring fire, a couch, armchair. To one side, a desk stuffed with papers and a typewriter. A spiral staircase winding through the ceiling; a book-lined room off the side. This is the world of author Patricia Highsmith as envisaged in Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Switzerland, a new play by Joanna Murray-Smith originally commissioned by Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Here, on a set purportedly based on Highsmith’s home in Switzerland, it is always dark outside, while inside all manner of murderous deeds are concocted alongside plots for future novels. Featuring many nods to her body of work, as well as drawing upon the rich connotations and associations of the genre and period itself, Switzerland sees Highsmith – the author of the Tom Ripley novels as well as Strangers on a Train and The Two Faces of January – becoming the subject of an enthralling two-hander stage-thriller set late in her life.

What is love?: STC's The Effect

What is love? People have struggled for centuries – no, millennia – trying to articulate an answer to this fundamental question without too much clarity one way or another. When you’re in love, it’s the most beautiful feeling of sharing yourself with another person; when you’re not in love it’s cruel and bitter and ugly. It’s something so deep it’s unreachable and unavoidable; something so intricate, yet so easily manipulated and crippled; the most blissful, merciless torture ever experienced by anyone on this earth; that’s what love is. And yet, apart from all of these emotional descriptions, love is a chemical process in our bodies and brains, a chemical which stimulates and colours our senses, moods, actions, bodily processes and decisions. In Lucy Prebble’s latest play The Effect, produced here by Sydney Theatre Company with Queensland Theatre Company, the clinical and physical reactions to love are examined amidst a drug trial for a new antidepressant, as real emotions and biophysical responses collide with chemically-induced stimulants.

Prebble’s play unfolds across a span of about six weeks, from the first day of the trial to sometime in the near future following its apparent conclusion. We first meet a two young people in their late twenties – Connie is a psychology student, while Tristan is a charismatic young man who has participated in a number of drug trials previously. Observing them are Dr Lorna James, a clinical psychiatrist, and Toby, her superior, but they too have a history; soon, the four of them are embroiled in a clash of ethics and perceptions, and it’s clear that nothing in life, as in love, is ever truly objective.

Leap of faith: STC's Vere (Faith)

Here are three facts:

In January 1836, Charles Darwin, naturalist, stood at Govett’s Leap in the Blue Mountains and first speculated that the Earth had evolved over millions of years.
In 1957, Vere Gordon Childe, archaeologist, fell to his death from Govett’s Leap, in an act that is considered by many to have been suicide.
In a university somewhere, a physicist at the top of his game is given a devastating diagnosis and his world falls apart.

In a co-production between the Sydney Theatre Company and State Theatre Company of South Australia, playwright John Doyle has used these three facts to create a timely and ultimately quite moving, eloquent and human meditation on science, faith, dignity and love. Vere (Faith) is indebted as much to Darwin and Hawking as it is to the strength and reflexive defensiveness of familial ties, as well as to Doyle’s wit and skill as an educator and broadcaster.