Latest news with #MalthouseTheatre
Time Out
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
A haunting new adaptation of 'The Birds' lands at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre
It's been more than 70 years since Daphne du Maurier wrote The Birds, the gothic short story that famously inspired Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film of the same name. Decades later, it remains one of the most unsettling tales ever told. Now, Malthouse Theatre is bringing this classic thriller to the stage in a bold new form: a reimagined one-woman show starring Paula Arundell (Three Furies, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry V). Adapted by Louise Fox and directed by former Malthouse artistic director Matthew Lutton (Picnic at Hanging Rock), the new production blends psychological horror with cutting-edge audio technology to create a truly immersive experience. As the theatre darkens and you don a pair of headphones, prepare for your pulse to race. The stunning sound design by J. David Franzke uses binaural sound – a 360-degree audio technique – to drag you into the haunting tale where a coastal town is under supernatural siege from a flock of birds. Arundell performs with tiny microphones in her ears, capturing every whisper, gasp, flap, screech and swoop as though it is terrifyingly close.
Sydney Morning Herald
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Winter might be setting in, but there's still plenty to do
For those who love the great outdoors, winter can be a challenging time. Fortunately in Melbourne there are always plenty of options when it comes to the arts and culture. Scheherazade Hamer Hall, June 2 For a transcendental start to your week like no other, join the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's 'quick fix at half six' on the first Monday of June – a 75-minute performance that kickstarts with excerpts and insights from the conductor before a work is performed in full. On this night in question, the conductor is Hong Kong-born, internationally renowned conductor Elim Chan and the work is Scheherazade, a symphonic suite composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1888 and based on One Thousand and One Nights. First Voices Showcase Iwaki Auditorium, June 4 Celebrate the culmination of one of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's most exciting artist development programs, the First Voices Composer program, at this showcase event. Hear the premiere of works by Jaadwa composer, producer and sound artist James Howard and Yorta Yorta, Wurundjeri and South Sea Islander multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Nathaniel Andrew, performed by musicians of the MSO, in an evening that celebrates the vital contribution of First Nations artists to the ongoing vitality of the orchestral sector. Noongar violinist, violist, composer and conductor Aaron Wyatt will conduct and present on the night. The Birds Malthouse, until June 7 Forever immortalised on film by master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock, Daphne du Maurier's chilling thriller The Birds has been adapted into a stage production at Malthouse Theatre. Directed by Malthouse's former artistic director Matthew Lutton and brought to life by playwright Louise Fox, the one-woman show stars Paula Arundell – one of Australia's most compelling stage actors – in an unforgettable tour de force. Armed with individual headsets, theatregoers are thrust into an adrenaline-fuelled soundscape of flying feathers and murderous swoops as relentless, supernatural birds attack a coastal town. Chinese Textile Donations from Tyon Gee Museum of Chinese Australian History, June 8 This one-of-a-kind event will unveil a beautiful capsule collection of Chinese garments donated by Tyon Gee, an early Chinese migrant who moved from Guangdong to Sydney in 1939 with her husband and two children. Her story and wardrobe reflect the resilience and cultural heritage of Chinese Australians in the 1930s, highlighting the tension at the time between tradition and assimilation and the preservation of cultural roots. It's a special opportunity to explore history through fabric, fashion, and migrant-led storytelling.
The Age
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Winter might be setting in, but there's still plenty to do
For those who love the great outdoors, winter can be a challenging time. Fortunately in Melbourne there are always plenty of options when it comes to the arts and culture. Scheherazade Hamer Hall, June 2 For a transcendental start to your week like no other, join the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's 'quick fix at half six' on the first Monday of June – a 75-minute performance that kickstarts with excerpts and insights from the conductor before a work is performed in full. On this night in question, the conductor is Hong Kong-born, internationally renowned conductor Elim Chan and the work is Scheherazade, a symphonic suite composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1888 and based on One Thousand and One Nights. First Voices Showcase Iwaki Auditorium, June 4 Celebrate the culmination of one of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's most exciting artist development programs, the First Voices Composer program, at this showcase event. Hear the premiere of works by Jaadwa composer, producer and sound artist James Howard and Yorta Yorta, Wurundjeri and South Sea Islander multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Nathaniel Andrew, performed by musicians of the MSO, in an evening that celebrates the vital contribution of First Nations artists to the ongoing vitality of the orchestral sector. Noongar violinist, violist, composer and conductor Aaron Wyatt will conduct and present on the night. The Birds Malthouse, until June 7 Forever immortalised on film by master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock, Daphne du Maurier's chilling thriller The Birds has been adapted into a stage production at Malthouse Theatre. Directed by Malthouse's former artistic director Matthew Lutton and brought to life by playwright Louise Fox, the one-woman show stars Paula Arundell – one of Australia's most compelling stage actors – in an unforgettable tour de force. Armed with individual headsets, theatregoers are thrust into an adrenaline-fuelled soundscape of flying feathers and murderous swoops as relentless, supernatural birds attack a coastal town. Chinese Textile Donations from Tyon Gee Museum of Chinese Australian History, June 8 This one-of-a-kind event will unveil a beautiful capsule collection of Chinese garments donated by Tyon Gee, an early Chinese migrant who moved from Guangdong to Sydney in 1939 with her husband and two children. Her story and wardrobe reflect the resilience and cultural heritage of Chinese Australians in the 1930s, highlighting the tension at the time between tradition and assimilation and the preservation of cultural roots. It's a special opportunity to explore history through fabric, fashion, and migrant-led storytelling.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Birds review – sparse, one-woman adaptation is a feat of sound design
The beautiful thing about Daphne du Maurier's 1952 short story, The Birds, is that it offers no explanation, no resolution and no catharsis. Birds simply amass, attack and wait; our attempts to corral the mystery grow increasingly desperate. This also leaves the adapter free to create their own meaning, to project anxieties on to the horror, whether current or primal. In this way, The Birds is always relevant. The most famous adaptation, of course, was Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film, which jettisoned so much of du Maurier's original that the two seem almost irreconcilable. Anyone coming to this stage adaptation only familiar with Hitchcock's version will find it much changed. It features none of the characters from the film and little of its squeamish family dynamics. About the only aspect of the story that is similar, at least in effect, is the overarching dread. Louise Fox adapts the material into a solo performance, the kind of virtuosic showcase Malthouse theatre has honed over time – Zahra Newman's take on Wake in Fright and Danny Ball in Loaded come particularly to mind. Here, Fox champions the wonderfully expressive Paula Arundell, inverting the family dynamics of du Maurier's story so it's the flinty and resourceful Tessa rather than her taciturn husband, Nat, who keeps the family alive. She is the one who initially suspects something is wrong with the birds and the one who comes to embody resistance and resilience at home. The first thing the audience will notice on arrival are the headphones on every seat. This is an aural as much as visual experience, with sound design by J. David Franzke that doesn't merely augment the atmosphere but situates the audience inside it. The binaural sound technology conjures a dizzying array of birdcalls, as well as sharpening the noises Tessa makes as she goes about boarding up her house or walking to a bus stop or simply smoking her final cigarette. This also means the birds become horrors of the imagination, all the more frightening for their lack of physical presence. Matthew Lutton directs with a strong sense of atmospherics and tonal control. He's long been fascinated in the intersection of film, literature and theatre and he manages to find a resonant dramatic vocabulary for this telling. It mightn't be consistently scary, but it does achieve that requisite sense of dread. Kat Chan's set design is meagre but practical. Niklas Pajanti's lighting is highly responsive. Arundell establishes characters with the barest of resources; whole familial conversations occur, differentiated by the slightest turn of the head. There are hilarious side characters, like Muriel the kindly conspiracy theorist. But it's Tessa who dominates, damaged and yet robust, resourceful and enthusiastic in the face of unimaginable terror. She's the beating heart against the storm. Hitchcock transposed the story from du Maurier's Cornwall to California, whereas Fox moves hers to an unnamed location somewhere in Australia – at least according to the accents and a few superfluous details. It's also some time like the present, because Tessa has a mobile phone – although one distracting anachronism has the family gathered around a radio for news. The shift in setting evokes local fire and flood disasters – and it also provides some humour, as a certain toughness and durability in the national character results in a laconic reaction to the threat. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion And the nature of that threat? Why are the birds suddenly feeling murderous towards the human race? How long will it go on? This adaptation, like previous ones, wisely refuses to clarify and the result is a generalised fear that presses down from above. Whether representative of climate collapse, nuclear war or just the overall degradation of the environment, these birds seem madder than ever. The Birds is at Malthouse's Beckett theatre until 7 June
The Age
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
It's time to meet the mystery woman behind Hitchcock's greatest hits
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' It's often cited as one of literature's greatest openings: in just a few words Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca conjures its narrator's voice, its haunting setting and the tone that will carry the rest of the mysterious novel. In the 1950s du Maurier was Britain's highest earning female author. This year Malthouse Theatre will mount an adaptation of her story The Birds, while Melbourne Theatre Company will take on Rebecca. If you know du Maurier's name but not much more, it's a fine time to get better acquainted. Melbourne film writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas lists du Maurier among her favourite authors. 'I'm actually surprised that more of her work hasn't been adapted. Her short stories are made for film. There's something really slippery about them that I find so beautiful, but also quite discomforting.' Like many, Heller-Nicholas came to du Maurier through Alfred Hitchcock. The master of suspense adapted three of du Maurier's tales – The Birds, Rebecca and the novel Jamaica Inn – but the long shadow he cast means that today most people associate those titles with the director, not the writer. For all their strengths, Hitchcock's films don't capture the extraordinary intimacy of du Maurier's prose. Heller-Nicholas calls Rebecca one of the great Gothic stories, comparing it to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. 'It's a story about how reality can't keep up with a fantasy. It's powerful and it's dark and it's beautiful and it's intimate. Rebecca reads like somebody's whispering into your ear.' MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks was living in London when she first happened upon a copy of Rebecca. She was bewitched. 'She draws you into the inner world of the characters, their fears and their fantasies, and then suddenly things get very complicated and the drama escalates. It is thrilling. This is a romance that becomes a mystery and it is thick with suspense.' The other reason Rebecca stayed with Sarks is that 'it was so ahead of its time. It's bold and her writing captures a wit and humour that still feels very fresh. Daphne du Maurier was speaking in a very sophisticated, coded way to women at the time and all these years later she still speaks to me.' Sarks says that du Maurier's ability to create landscapes through language is a gift to anyone trying to adapt her work. '(Her) writing is incredibly evocative. It's poetic and muscular. She crafts vivid descriptions of the trees, the flowers, the rhododendrons and azaleas, and of the woods surrounding Manderley. The natural world is another character in the book and in our production too.' Then there's the haunting (and perhaps haunted) setting of Manderley. The gothic manor was modelled on Menabilly, a gorgeous country home in Cornwall that du Maurier discovered as a teenager and later restored. In private letters she often spoke of her love for the estate she called home for more than 20 years, and in a later essay on Rebecca she described it in terms as lavish and vivid as any of her fictions: 'At midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in strange and eerie fashion we are at one, the house and I.' Du Maurier's life off the page was as interesting as anything she invented. Born into a sprawling dynasty of actors, authors and artists, she led a tomboyish childhood that translated itself into what she called the 'male energy' that fuelled her writing. She was rankled when people cast her as a romance novelist, but as the decades have passed her reputation as a serious literary talent has grown. She was a contradictory figure, described by some as reclusive and by others as a warm and witty host. She could be proud, but her own family only discovered she'd been made a Dame when they read it in the newspaper. Loading Du Maurier's elusive character is mirrored in her writing; even when grounded in reality, something unsettling hovers beneath the surface. Du Maurier's delicate use of the paranormal brings to mind Shirley Jackson, another mid-century author whose work frequently produced a sense of the eerie. 'The parallels with Shirley Jackson are really interesting,' says Heller-Nicholas. 'Whether we want to call them capital-F feminist writers or not is obviously open to debate, but certainly these are two writers who at their best were interested in the gendered experience. They really understood how the fantastic is a language to explore that.' The Birds is one of du Maurier's most effective short stories. Unlike Hitchcock's sunny version, the original takes place in grey Cornwall, where a farmer and his family find themselves under inexplicable avian attack. As it becomes clear that this violence is both coordinated and occurring across the country, the beleaguered victims find their chances of rescue dwindling while their questions only grow. Malthouse artistic director Matt Lutton hit upon du Maurier's short story while pondering the possibility of 'adrenaline and terror in the theatre. How can we create something that will really have a big bodily impact on audiences?' He recalled that Hitchcock's adaptation had terrified him, but when he came to the original tale he found so much more to play with. He took the idea to writer Louise Fox. She called it a no-brainer: 'Du Maurier's a deeply adaptable writer, for theatre, for film, for other mediums ... Her metaphors stay open, and her use of genre and the paranormal and the mysterious is very evocative. It's weird because she was always considered a romance writer. But actually, she's a writer about anxiety and paranoia and fear and overthinking. She's probably got more in common with Kafka than she has with a romance novelist.' Critic Mark Fisher has attributed the eeriness of du Maurier's tales to the way they reveal how our attempts at making sense of the world are laughably fragile. Birds shouldn't attack en masse. Rebecca should stay dead, or at least have the decency to out herself as a ghost. Fox agrees that the sense of fighting something you can't even explain is something people of all eras can understand: 'The desperate attempt to try and make sense of something that is incomprehensible or unexplainable or hard to define.' Lutton and Fox's adaptation will be performed by one woman (Paula Arundell) complemented by a rich soundscape piped through headphones straight to audience members' ears. The director says his aim is 'to tap into that very primal animal instinct of what it means to feel attacked. We all know what it is to be swooped by birds. You naturally protect your eyes, your ears, and I think that's about feeling, in a metaphorical way, like something much larger than you, that you definitely can't control, is assaulting you.' He jokes that audience members fleeing their seats would be a sign of success, but also notes that 'there are no birds in the theatre. It's sound and it's light and it's a performer. It's the power of a ghost story or a campfire story. When you tell a campfire story, you start to see the story in the shadows around the fire.' As long as we keep telling stories, hopefully, du Maurier's shadows will keep offering up their secrets.
