Picnic At Hanging Rock

This isn't the Picnic At Hanging Rock you know. Tom Wright's riveting adaptation of Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel has amplified the (existential) horror. And, while it strives to account for how a group of school girls and their mistress vanished on Hanging Rock in Victoria during an expedition on Valentine's Day 1900, there's no resolution. The Picnic At Hanging Rock story is told — re-enacted — by the ensemble cast of five women, fluidly portraying all the roles under Matthew Lutton's astute direction.

The production assumes the audience's familiarity with, if not Lindsay's text, then Peter Weir's iconic film or "the myth". Wright draws out the absurdities of an English colonial life in Australia that Lindsay herself understood, to sardonic comic effect. Occasionally he's over-didactic in his contemporary commentary (one character uses the term "The Other"), where Lindsay is noted for subtle minimalism, her readers trusted to extrapolate. Wright's most revelatory achievement is in an intelligently sympathetic rendering of the English headmistress Mrs Appleyard (channelled by Elizabeth Nabben), another casualty to "the patterns of the picnic".

Picnic At Hanging Rock is atmospheric, with powerful sound design. Even EDM is utilised startlingly. The stage choreography and scene changes in the dark are astonishing (the crew apparently had night vision goggles) and the rock itself has an eerie presence. One detail is particularly inexplicable — why do the girls wear modern winter private school uniforms?