Olivia De Jonge, Kirsty Marillier, Contessa Treffone, Lorinda May Merrypor and Masego Pitso in Sydney Theatre Company’s Picnic at Hanging Rock 2025. Photo: Daniel Boud ©
Joan Lindsay’s classic novel PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is set on Valentine’s Day, 1900, in the sweltering summer heat of the Victorian Highlands, four schoolgirls sneak away from their excursion to climb the imposing monolith of Hanging Rock, pulled higher and higher by a mysterious force. All but one disappears without a trace.
Playwright Tom Wright, wrote in his program note to his stage adaptation which is currently being presented at the Drama Theatre, “The novel Is about more than what can be seen on the surface. It’s about language. And patriarchy. And sexual psychology. And metaphysical dread.”
Director Ian Michael wrote of the novel, “Picnic at Hanging Rock challenges us to think about what happens when we don’t tread lightly, disrupt scared grounds of ceremony and initiation, and impose foreign structures and names upon stolen land.”
Really?!
Joan Lindsay (1896-1984) came from well education white stock and was a novelist, playwright, essayist and painter. She wrote the novel Picnic at Hanging Rock when she was 71 years old and it was published as a historical gothic novel.
Lindsay made it known that the novel came to her in a dream, and essentially what she did was to get it all down on paper and then shape it, as a writer does.
It is not the only story about the good fortune that some creative artists have Famously, Paul McCartney said that the melody to his song Yesterday came to him in a dream. He couldn’t believe that such a beautiful melody just came to him, and he spent days after asking if anyone had heard the melody in case he had picked it up from somewhere. At first he called the song Scrambled Eggs. It was only later that he wrote the poignant lyric and the song became Yesterday.
The point I am getting to is that to suggest that Lindsay wrote her novel with such such themes as ‘imposing foreign structures and names open stolen land, and issues such as sexual psychology and patriarchy’ in mind is a fiction, just as much of a fiction as Lindsay herself committed when she left it open for readers to think that hers was a true story!
I would have enjoyed Ian Michael’s production of Tom Wright’s play if they had been honest with audiences and said that they were inspired by and had used Lindsay’s novel as a vehicle to add their own meanings rather than saying that it was all there in the text.
I am sorry dear readers but as much as I enjoyed the wonderfully atmospheric staging, the very visceral nature of the production, and the very fine performances, I just felt alienated, and just couldn’t connect or engage.
Director Ian Michael, Designer Elizabeth Gatsby, Lighting Designer Trent Suidgeest, Composer and Sound designer James
With Olivia De Jonge, Kirsty Mariller, Lorinda May, Merrypor, Masego Pitso, Contessa Treffone,.
A Sydney Theatre Company production, Tom Wright’s stage adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s novel PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, directed by Ian Michael, is playing the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, until the 5th April 2025.
http://www.sydneyartsguide.com.au
Production photography by Daniel Boud
