Memory is a tricksy companion at the best of times. Even more so when tragedy strikes and lives are shattered or erased.
Grief swirls in unexpected directions, consuming us all of a sudden. In pushing us further forward or pulling us back to where we started, the details get lost, washed away like sand on a beach, then reformed all too painfully clear.
So it is with Australian playwright Tom Holloway’s confronting puzzle of a memory play, Beyond the Neck. Subtitled ‘A Quartet on Loss and Violence,’ it was written as a collective trauma response to the Port Arthur massacre and the indiscriminate slaughter of 35 lives, horrendously injuring 23 more.
Drawing on survivor stories using some of the techniques of verbatim-style, the work is a reckoning with how well-meaning media gags on reporting the aftermath and the court case stunted the recovery process for many survivors and opened the door for rampant conspiracy theories.
Ooft, this sounds heavy. Should I brace myself?
Look, there’s heavy stuff in here, undoubtedly. But Beyond the Neck is also a hopeful and occasionally hilarious play that reminds us that, even when we are lost in the labyrinth, we can find our way back by following those memory threads.
Who's involved?
First performed at Hobart’s Peacock Theatre in 2007, nearly a decade after the disaster that reshaped Australia’s gun laws, Holloway’s bracing work still holds sway.
This Theatre Works restaging, coming so soon after the atrocity at Bondi Beach, is directed by Suzanne Chaundy, who also oversaw the Red Stitch revival in 2012.
She casts the inimitable Francis Greenslade, star of stage and screen, as a tour guide who witnessed the awful events of that terrible day firsthand. And yet somehow, he has managed to stay in that place, turning up for work, day after day, with nothing more than a concealed hunger for cigarettes to get him through.
Assembled in the lofty Theatre Works auditorium, we are his tour group as the avuncularly ocker host addresses us as if we were the convicts deposited at this beautiful but soaked with bad blood historical site, once a penal colony. Often for crimes as insignificant as stealing a loaf of bread, yet so brutally punished that they had to build an asylum to house those left broken by the abuse.
You see, there’s always been bad mojo here, no matter how beautiful the sandstone edifices in leafy coastal grounds remain.
The unsettling setting is effectively signified by a heavy-framed oil painting of the prison and surrounding landscape that’s hung mid-air by set designer Emma Ashton. A ghost of what this place once was, it is eerily backlit by lighting designer Richard Vabre.
That’s all there is of the staging, beyond four wooden cabaret chairs, with Ashton’s contemporary casual costume design similarly stripped back.
Greenslade is joined on stage by Cassidy Dunn as a teenager whose dad was murdered here, who can’t quite accept this awful reality. Festering in her room and delving ever deeper down the rabbit hole of untruths online, she despises her stepdad, her father’s best friend who is now with her mum and insists there must have been a government cover-up. That the authorities must have unleashed a professional shooter for whatever reason.
These two of four unnamed characters are the most indelibly linked to the horrifying events of that unimaginable day, with Freddy Collyer’s fidgeting and restless young boy wrangling with his own awful choices and Emmaline Carroll Southwell’s holidaymaker rounding out the cast as they all descend on Port Arthur for the day.
Who stands out?
Greenslade is particularly spot on, with his grin-and-bear-it jocularity concealing a deep psychological wound that speaks to the generational harm done by toxically buttoned-up masculinity and a socially imposed inability to cry out in pain.
An astonishing actor, Greenslade carries us with him through this constantly shifting work in which each player essentially monologues, but is constantly interrupted by the others, who guess it or actively rewrite the details.
Dunn is also brilliant as a teenager full of bluster and big ‘whatever’ energy, though clearly someone who desperately needs to drop their defence, allow truth into darkness and embrace their mother. When she and Greenslade’s tour guide meet in the ruins of the café, Beyond the Neck is at its strongest.
While Southwell’s character is only tangentially related to this physical place, she is adept at outlining how grief can warp our minds more broadly, as those waves of despair crash over and over.
Collyer is saddled with the least effective character, a boy battling his worst impulses who causes us to wonder how monsters are born. But Holloway’s brushstrokes here are too broad, and Collyer plays precocious youth far too bluntly.
Even with these weaker links, the ensemble bears us forth with a musicality that’s intricately choreographed by Chaundy and set to a sparse string score by composer Philip McLeod in such a way that the weight of it all washes over us in what remains a formidable play.
Who should see Beyond the Neck?
Anyone who refuses to turn away from our darkest days and most distraught impulses, instead seeking answers.
'Beyond the Neck' is on now at Theatre Works until April 4, 2026. For more information and to book tickets, head to the website.
Stay in the loop: sign up for our free Time Out Melbourne newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox.