It feels like an unresolved chord. Everything is on edge. Suspended. Pregnant. Five young women stand across a bare stage. Stock still, they narrate their story. All it takes is a single step forward and the tension escalates.
The almost inaudible whispers and rattles of Ash Gibson Greig’s soundscape add to the creepiness. We know something’s afoot long before the pocket watches inexplicably stop at midday.
But these pupils are not the familiar figures in virginal white from Peter Weir’s 1975 classic film. Rather, in Matthew Lutton’s gripping production for Australia’s Malthouse and Black Swan companies, they are modern-day private school girls in navy blue blazers with red trim, a touch more savvy and less erotically charged than their predecessors.
It puts them at a distance from Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel which masquerades as the true turn-of-the-century story of the disappearance of three students and a teacher at the volcanic spot in Victoria.
The distance, however, is deceptive. The more the tale takes a hold, the more actors Harriet Gordon-Anderson, Arielle Gray, Amber McMahon, Elizabeth Nabben, and Nikki Shiels ditch the third-person narrative in favour of dramatic dialogue. In the blink of an eye – the show is a masterclass in stage management – they switch into period costume. It’s as if they become possessed by their own story and the primal forces it invokes.
Scripted by Tom Wright, whose Voltaire adaptation Optimism was seen here in 2009, the play has unexpected echoes of Lee Hall’s Alan Warner adaptation Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour.
Where that play followed a group of convent schoolgirls from smalltown Oban to the seedier corners of Edinburgh, taking on the cast of characters as they went, this one follows a rather more genteel party of young ladies into the dark heart of Australia.
“In a geological sense, we sleep on a sea of flame,” says one, alluding to untameable volcanic forces ever ready to defy the prim boarding-school illusion of a civilised society. What Wright and Lutton recognise is that Picnic at Hanging Rock is no mere mystical whodunnit, like a down under episode of The X-Files, but a metaphor for the limits and contradictions of colonialism.
Under the auspices of the expat Mrs Appleyard, the school is an anachronistic throwback to the values of the British empire, all gentility, white gloves and emotional repression. The staff are convinced the beauty of poetry and the order of arithmetic are sufficient to tame a hostile landscape.
If such attitudes were becoming redundant in the UK in 1900, they were more irrelevant still in the vigorous young nation of Australia, not least because of the untameable cruelty of nature itself.
So it is as if this Valentine’s Day outing conjures up a romance between the school’s adolescent girls and the dark masculine mystery of the landscape. They are compelled beyond rational explanation to abandon the ordered, the civilised and the polite in favour of the raw, the dangerous and the vast. Lindsay’s story holds its mythological power because it is a mystery that is unresolved. It tests the limits of human control.
As it does so, it exposes the fissures in supposedly civilised society. Behind the prim appearances are tales of abandoned children, neglected orphans and financial greed. Lutton’s production becomes a vision of psychological breakdown as a prettified illusion is ripped apart by the raw force of nature. It’s a show with a volcanic power.
• At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 28 January. Box office: 0131 248 4848.
