Picnic at Hanging Rock. By Tom Wright, adapted from the novel by Joan Lindsay. Directed by Matilda Hatcher. National University Theatre Society. Kambri Drama Theatre, ANU, May 8 to 11 at 7.30pm. Tickets $10 - 20. nutspresentspicnic-event.getqpay.com/.
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![The National University Theatre Society's production of Picnic at Hanging Rock includes Lilliana Cazabon-Mitchell as one of the cast who all play multiple roles. Picture: Jasmine Ryan The National University Theatre Society's production of Picnic at Hanging Rock includes Lilliana Cazabon-Mitchell as one of the cast who all play multiple roles. Picture: Jasmine Ryan](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc754hlln8eesc6038chw.jpg/r0_307_6000_3694_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
On February 14, 1900, a group of girls and teachers from Appleyard College go on a picnic in the environs of geological formation Hanging Rock. By the end of the day, some of them have disappeared, never to be seen again.
Picnic at Hanging Rock has become one of the legendary Australian tales: its mystery, repressed sexuality and hints of the supernatural have tantalised people for decades.
For years, rumours circulated the 1967 novel's author, Joan Lindsay, had based it on a true story and the 1975 film and 2018 mini-series helped keep it in the public consciousness.
Now comes the Canberra premiere of Tom Wright's 2016 theatrical adaptation presented by the National University Theatre Society. Second-year ANU student Matilda Hatcher is making her directorial debut.
Hatcher, an art history and curatorship and history student, says this is the third production of Wright's play - the first two were in Melbourne (2016) and Edinburgh (2017).
"It has an all-female cast of five performers ... They take on every single role in the production, 20 of them - British and Australian, male and female."
The play unfolds as a story within a story with five Melbourne schoolgirls retelling the events of that fateful Valentine's Day. The actors shift between personae and characterisations and times, helped by costume changes, and alterations in movement and voice.
Among the other elements of the work for the women to bring out are female homoeroticism and the contrasts between the English and more Australian characters, trespassers on an ancient land: "[t]hey try to understand their roles as colonisers - it really gets to the heart of colonial anxieties". Hatcher and her cast - Annaika Lellman, Audrey Ho, Lilliana Cazabon-Mitchell, Marnia Mount and Anna Bernard - were inspired by Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty to create an alienating view of the Australian bush.
[T]hey try to understand their roles as colonisers - it really gets to the heart of colonial anxieties.
- Matilda Hatcher, director
Theatre of Cruelty, Hatcher says, is a technique Artaud developed in the 1930s. "Cruelty" here does not mean violence but is concerned with removing barriers between actors and audiences and liberating repressed instincts.
"The subconscious is the source of suppressed emotion," Hatcher says of it, adding that language is not enough to express this: a physicality somewhere between thought and gesture is employed, incorporating techniques of Japanese dance theatre Butoh and aided by "eerie, atmospheric and sensual" sound effects.
She is also employing excerpts from Prokofiev's Cinderella ballet and traditional Indigenous sounds in the soundscape.
"We want to pierce the audience's senses," she says.
Adding to the tension will be the intimacy of the production. It's in the 150-seat black box Kambri Drama Theatre at ANU, with the set consisting of a Victorian sitting room with a background of large trees to represent the story's different environments.
The aim is to create "a nightmarish landscape of the unknown" to create a story "that draws upon ideas of womanhood, the natural and the confined".