Saturday March 30, 2024
THE HANGING
Review

THE HANGING

August 4 2016

THE HANGING, Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, 2August-10 September 2016. Photography by Lisa Tomasetti: above - Luke Carroll, Ashleigh Cummings and Genevieve Lemon; right: Luke Carroll

Joan Lindsay’s popular novel – and the even more popular movie adaptation – Picnic at Hanging Rock was set in 1900 in the intense atmosphere of an exclusive school for young ladies in rural VictoriaIt was a time when women, unhappy and frustrated by their constricted and subservient place in society, were rebelling – consciously or otherwise and severely discomfiting their men. As a consequence, while some women called it being a suffragette, many more were diagnosed with  “hysteria” and subjected to all kinds of treatments – including incarceration in “insane asylums” and hysterectomy if they didn’t respond properly.

And now? Angela Betzien’s terrific new play riffs on a 21st century version of hysteria and female rebellion – as director Sarah Goodes writes in her program notes: “...Iris (Ashleigh Cummings), in particular, is at a stage when society’s many ideas of youth and beauty quite often contradict the lack of autonomy and inability to be heard that this time of life can hold.”

Iris is a 15-year-old pupil at an exclusive girls’ school from which she and her two BFFs absconded in a tacit homage to the novel. A week after going missing Iris turns up in the (shudder) western suburbs of Melbourne with apparently no memory of where she’s been nor what happened to the other two. In some distress, covered in scratches and dirt, Iris has requested the presence of her English teacher Ms (not Miss or Mrs, if you please) Corrossi (Genevieve Lemon) at an interview with a child protection unit police officer.

The meeting takes place at her family beach house – Sergeant Flint’s (Luke Carroll) attempt to make the girl feel more comfortable. But, as with the original Oz-Gothic story, nothing is quite as it seems. For a start, Ms Corrossi is well aware that the request is not because of Iris’s trust in or affection for her. She knows the three girls called her “Vinegar Tits” behind her back despite – or perhaps because of – her “carpe diem” Dead Poets Society aspirations for the trio.

As well, it quickly becomes apparent that neither Iris’s relationship with her father nor her missing friends are what Sergeant Flint has assumed. The spectres of the persistent contemporary tropes of automatic suspicion of adults and possible sexual predation lurk in the shadows. 

They are made more ominous and fleetingly apparent by the video imagery of bushland and forest that occasionally looms over the stage and the washes of music and soundscape which loosen the ties with reality on an otherwise stark, modern setting. (Design, Elizabeth Gadsby; lighting, Nicholas Rayment; composer and sound designer, Steve Francis; video designer, David Bergman.)

THE HANGING

The Hanging is 90 minutes non-stop enthralling and bubbling with ideas, drama – and unexpectedly – wry comedy. Genevieve Lemon gives one of the performances of the year as the world-weary idealist with a twist. As the bleakly unhappy school girl, 23-year-old Ashleigh Cummings maintains the teetering line between child and adult that is so much a part of late adolescence.

As the cop, Luke Carroll has perhaps less to work with, but on the other hand, his somewhat wooden demeanour isn’t out of place and his interaction with the girl is – finally – touching and credible

However, Chekhov would surely have had something to say about his being required to wear a service revolver for the duration of the play. Its bulk, at his hip, is a distraction – as the presence of a firearm always is (in this country at least). Is it going to be used? Will it be grabbed by the girl or the teacher? Will something happen – as Chekhov insists must be the case if it is present on a stage? 

Would a child protection officer really carry a gun during such a sensitive task? It’s a puzzling note in an otherwise fine production – Sarah Goodes’ last at the company before she moves to Melbourne Theatre Company and the next step in her career. Recommended.

 

 

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