The Second Time's The Charm For A Return Trip To Switzerland

14 September 2016 | 1:33 pm | Maxim Boon

"It's not often you get to revisit something, and find out how its grown. It's an amazing experiment in sense memory."

The benefit of hindsight is an all too rare luxury, especially for theatre-makers. A director can tweak a production and fine tune, but largely, once the curtain rises on opening night, a show's parameters are set. "It's something that's a beautiful quality of theatre, but it can also be pretty frustrating," director Sarah Goodes explains. "You put all this love and effort into something to bring it to life and then it just disappears in a puff of smoke. It exists for a time then it's gone, so having the chance to return to a production, especially with the same cast and creative team, is such a gift."

Goodes is referring to her debut show for Melbourne Theatre Company as its new Associate Director: a revival of the highly successful premiere staging of Joanna Murray Smith's Switzerland, first presented by STC (where Goodes was formerly Associate Director for four years) in 2014.

While it's no doubt reassuring to be working on an established success for her first MTC production, Goodes is more grateful for the opportunity to search out undiscovered corners of already charted territory. "It's a nice soft landing into a new city, but to be honest, I'm just very excited to be inside this wonderful play again," she admits. "It's not often you get to revisit something, and find out how its grown. It's an amazing experiment in sense memory. At the first rehearsal, when we played some of the music for the opening moments of the show, we all instantly stepped back inside the world of this play. No decoding required; we were already all there."

"It's not often you get to revisit something, and find out how its grown. It's an amazing experiment in sense memory."

As you might expect from a new text, exploring this play for the first time was a process of discovery, of nips and tucks, trial and error. But this play also posed some unique challenges during its development. Switzerland is a work of fiction with an anchor of truth, exploring a postulated encounter between the invented character of a young publishing company employee and the very real Patricia Highsmith, the reclusive crime author, best known for The Talented Mister Ripley and the crime series featuring her most enduring character, the eponymous scoundrel, Ripley. The play imagines a meeting between Highsmith (portrayed by Sarah Peirse) and a young man, Edward (played by Eamon Farren), dispatched to the author's secluded home in Locarno, Switzerland, tasked with persuading her to pen one final Ripley instalment.

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Crafting a portrayal of a real person acting out fictional events was a balancing act between respectful homage and dramatic license, Goodes tells. "We never intended the play to be a biopic. Switzerland is more concerned with the themes of Highsmith's writing and the internal drive she had as a writer. This version of her is conceived like one of her own characters, so it's a tribute to her creativity as an author."

It's an ingenious approach which has allowed Murray-Smith to trawl the murky depths of Highsmith's dark psyche to dredge-up a character that honours the iconic writer without stumbling into the realm of caricature. Taking the narrative lead from Highsmith's oeuvre and it's violent, subversively erotic and morally ambiguous themes has inevitably yielded a tense and enigmatic thriller. It's a dramatic world perfectly suited to the stage, Goodes believes. "It's a very psychological piece, that's playful but also very guarded. There's this very compelling sense of unknowingness - it would be totally wrong to try and pin everything down in this piece. It's the constant flux of these two characters and their motivations that bring this play to life. I think we feel more confident about holding on to that quality going into it a second time."

Highsmith's razor-edged prose has fascinated directors for decades. Her debut novel, Strangers On A Train, was adapted for the screen by the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, and the 1999 film version of The Talented Mr Ripley, starring Jude Law, Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, earned unanimous critical and box-office praise as well as no less than five Oscar nominations. In addition to these mainstream successes, Highsmith was also a master of subversion. Narratives featuring lesbian eroticism, unlikable hedonists, amoral anti-heroes and morbidly dark humour made her both notoriously controversial and a cult figure. However, Goodes has also been struck by the more reserved qualities of Highsmith's writing. "Her ability to capture the psychological landscapes of people - not just the horrifying or scandalising stuff, but the human frailty of characters too - is just breathtaking. She really was a poet."

Returning to Highsmith's alpine world has allowed Goodes, Farren and Peirse to hew yet more emotional nuances into the work. "It's been two years since we first staged it, and that has all sorts of benefits," Goodes shares. "We've had a long time to really understand the mood and subtleties of this universe, but we also already have a level of trust in this text that lets us embrace its mystery. Having this much time getting to know these two characters has given us the confidence to let them be a little unknown as well."

Melbourne Theatre Company presents Switzerland 17 Sep to 29 Oct.