PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

By Diana Simmonds

February 23 2025

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, Sydney Theatre Company at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 21 February-5 April 2025. Photography by Daniel Boud

Written and first staged in 2016 in Melbourne at Malthouse (then Perth for WA State Theatre, and in Edinburgh), on opening night in Sydney, playwright Tom Wright remarked of his adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock that it had been a different time, a different place when he wrote it, and how the world has now changed. Yes, indeed, as we navigate an increasingly threatening world. It adds poignancy to the innocence and naughtiness of the girls who famously disobey their teacher and go exploring the monolith of the title.

Set in 1900, the novel was written in 1967 by Joan Lindsay who was prolific but produced nothing of similar power before or afterward. In 1975 it was made into one of the most memorable films of the 20th century by Peter Weir. This play, however, has nothing to do with the overwhelming imagery of the film. Rather, it’s a tight, tense 90 minutes of formal groupings of the girls, and telling of events. The black cavern of the Drama theatre stage is sparsely lit (by Trent Suidgeest). Luminescence seems mainly to come from above through reflection and illumination of a massive rectangular form. On it is occasionally projected a keyword or words. Repeatedly, the girls are pinned like butterflies with horizontal shafts of white light.

The abstraction is relieved – and heightened – by a forest floor of natural detritus and the sporadic appearance of human clues: a touch of period Chinoiserie in the jardiniere of blue hydrangeas on a bamboo stand. An incongruous bit of gym equipment is added to amplify the obsessive anxiety among the girls as they leap and run, leap and run (designer Elizabeth Gadsby).

Over and through it all is composer and sound designer James Brown’s work to spread the anxiety and sense of foreboding to the audience. Apprehensive adults repeatedly describe the landscape of the picnic grounds as malevolent and dangerous. While there is occasional relief in birdsong and other sounds of the bush, the dominating effect is the thrumming and vibration of overheated imaginations and baking, windless middays.

Director Ian Michael has approached the classic tale with an original eye for its present possibilities of verity or novel. There’s not a pan pipe nor picture hat to be seen as Olivia De Jonge, Kirsty Marillier, Lorinda May Merrypor, Masego Pitso, and Contessa Treffone enact the gothic horror story. Of the merry band that takes a charabanc ride to the popular spot, three girls disappear into the hot afternoon while exploring the picturesque remains of the six-million-year-old volcano.

Lindsay, herself wickedly began her novel: “Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction my readers must decide for themselves.” There is, of course, an uneasy history of missing children in Australian mythology – from Frederick McCubbin’s “Lost” to the Beaumonts, Azaria Chamberlain, and countless stolen Indigenous children.

Induced spine chills aside, the possible significance of the excursion occurring on Valentine’s Day is ignored by all but the most romantic of the girls. The hapless head of school Miss Appleyard (De Jonge) is concerned mainly at the school’s destruction as parents withdraw their precious daughters from the site of notoriety. In the aftermath, a spiffing young Englishman (Treffone) joins the fruitless hunt for the girls, but as in the novel, what happened remains a mystery – not least because Lindsay’s explanatory ending was lopped off before publication never to be seen again.

Ironically, the play’s ending is the least satisfactory element of an otherwise poetic and beautifully constructed (and acted) work. The final scenes become mannered flashes of short and shorter as blackouts hinder the pace, and the telling becomes uneven.

The audience is left with “Ngannelong” – the Indigenous name for the place. Like so much of ancient Australia, it’s been ignored and disregarded for as long as picnickers and day-trippers have marveled on the one hand and given themselves the shudders on the other. Appropriate, perhaps, and very Mod Oz.