Picnic at Hanging Rock review – a haunting, heady horror story

The Guardian

22-02-2025

If you close your eyes, just for a second, and think of Hanging Rock, what comes to mind? Schoolgirls in long white dresses? Pan pipes? The 'geological marvel' of the rock itself, where four girls went missing on Valentine's Day in 1900 and only one came back?
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film based on Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel, and its images, motifs and mood, all fundamental to the Australian new wave, have burrowed into our cultural consciousness over the decades and become defining.
But that story is a fiction, and the rock – Ngannelong – has memories, history, and legacy of its own that pre-exists the story of this nation. Ignore it at your own peril.
Sydney Theatre Company's Picnic at Hanging Rock, written by Tom Wright and presented here in a remarkable production directed by Ian Michael, takes the mystery of the missing girls from Appleyard College and transforms it by focusing on the truth has been lurking inside of it all along: a trespass, a tragedy and a haunting.
Ngannelong, for longer than we can imagine, was a site for men's ceremony and initiation for the Dja Dja Wurrung, the Woi Wurrung and the Taungurung, as well as a place for meeting and trade. If Picnic at Hanging Rock is a ghost story – and it is in this play, characters suddenly struck by something interior and unseen, lunging at one another as if possessed – it's no surprise. And there are more ghosts than just the girls of Appleyard College.
The ensemble – Olivia De Jonge, Kirsty Marillier, Lorinda May Merrypor, Masego Pitso and Contessa Treffone – are all dressed in school uniforms and playing characters who share their names, at least at first. Their recitative storytelling, which pairs Wright's poetic, imagery-laden language with verbatim lines from Lindsay's book, is like a spell: words become story, stories become scenes and the ensemble, like a possession, become characters from the Picnic at Hanging Rock tale.
Each is giving an excellent performance, full of detail and disappearing acts. They duck and weave through lines, events and characters: De Jonge becomes school headmistress Mrs Appleyard; Marillier is Irma, the sole missing girl returned; Treffone is young Englishman Fitzhubert, a witness so plagued by thoughts of the lost girls he sets out to look for them; Merrypor is the local constable; Pitso is Sara, a young student haunted by loss.
These are characters suppressed, repressed and simmering. Sara cannot be seen to mourn Miranda, the lost student she deeply loved. Mrs Appleyard hides her rage and disgust under perfect posture and brandy. Fitzhubert and Albert, his coachman, are drawn to each other in the private moments that dissolve the restrictions of polite society – constraints that seem devastatingly pointless in the shadow of the rock.
And we really are always at Ngannelong in this production. Elizabeth Gadsby's set keeps us there with a looming architectural white structure hovering overhead, marking out a smaller playing space on the Drama Theatre's letterbox stage with a carpet of leaves where each scene unfolds. We're trapped, like in any great Australian gothic, within the world of European civility imposed on stolen land.
Michael's direction presents Wright's play so deftly and confidently that its narrative is skillfully playing on the surface while, beneath it, a second and more extraordinary thing is occurring. In his hands, this mystery becomes a horror story so slowly we're barely conscious of the evolution.
This is an achievement of craft, tone and interpretation, and the production design marks each step of the way for the audience – we can feel the shifts before we see them. At first, lighting designer Trent Suidgeest paints with palettes you'd expect: a clarifying daylight, somber twilights. But after the girls' trespass, it changes, playing so effectively with shadow and blackouts that, when the sky is sliced open with a flash of stark horror-red, it's genuinely scary.
Amplifying and supporting Michael's finely-wrought direction, too, is James Peter Brown's sound design and score. It wraps around your throat and squeezes, lacing the rising tension with distant drums and beautiful melodies that still somehow sound like warnings, mixed with ever-present reminders that someone, or something, is always there: the calling of birds, the rustling of leaves.
This Picnic at Hanging Rock is beautifully handled, tender and then ferocious, funny and uncomfortable, a heady descent into terror and beauty. When you leave, you'll leave with ghosts – but if you listen closer, if you close your eyes, you'll realise the ghosts have been there all along.
Picnic at Hanging Rock runs until 5 April at Sydney Opera House