“The wind changed overnight, and it was winter,” writes Daphne du Maurier in the ominous mood-establishing opening line of her im-peck-ably crafted ecological horror, The Birds, in which our avian observers inexplicably turn against us.
A chill that appears to have flocked to Melbourne just in time for the stage adaptation of the same name opening at the Malthouse Theatre, a few short days after an Indian summer unexpectedly froze over. The Birds marks the final in-house production helmed by outgoing artistic director Matthew Lutton, working from a screenplay by multi-disciplinary writer Louise Fox (The Trial). She’s hewn much closer to the talons of the du Maurier yarn than the Alfred Hitchcock film.
First published in her 1952 short story collection The Apple Tree, du Maurier’s warning is set in the isolated farms and blustery cliffs of her Cornwall home. The winds of change then brought a shiver of a different kind via the nuclear threat of Cold War.
“Can you tell me where this cold is coming from? Is it Russia? I’ve never seen such a change,” says Mrs Triggs, the neighbour of Nat Hocken, the WWII veteran on a disability pension at the centre of the short story, in a telling nod.
As with Hitchcock’s freely spinning screenwriter Evan Hunter, Fox centres a woman as our protagonist. But not the spiky San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels of the film, depicted by Tippi Hedren, who was infamously tortured by Hitchcock in her cursed debut appearance. Instead, award-winning actor Paula Arundell (Anthony and Cleopatra) predominantly plays Nat’s unnamed-by-du Maurier wife, now known as Tessa.
Much like Eryn Jean Norvill and her alternate Nikki Shiels in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the extraordinarily adept Arundell plays everyone – Tess and Nat, their uncannily small-sounding kids Jill and Johnny, conspiracy-spouting neighbour Muriel, her kids and more – though both the cast and the staging are more compact. Set and costume designer Kat Chan clads Arundell in dark corduroy pants and a navy cable-knit jumper, perched on a raised grey dais circled unnervingly by a halo of precariously hung birdhouses.
The stripped-back intimacy of the show, gradually retreating to the claustrophobic confines of Tessa and a more prone-to-panic Nat’s cottage, is further amplified by the discreet, Walkman-like headphones we’re asked to don at the start of the show. This is how we are terrorised by the birds, through composer and sound designer J. David Franzke’s shrieking, squawking, tearing cacophony, piped directly into our on-edge brains.
What we lose in the communal impact of horror-viewing with fellow travellers in a flap as the audience members’ gasps are muted, we gain in the show’s inescapable isolation; an idea at one with du Maurier’s story. Niklas Pajanti’s lighting design is less effective, with the stage far too bright, for the most part, needlessly exposing the mundane prop stations Arundell darts to and from. The chiaroscuro slash of spotlights tearing at sudden darkness, envisioning clawing attacks, is stronger, leaving me craving more shadow.
The wild and unwieldy beauty of du Maurier’s cautionary tale, an ecological horror underpinned by the mercenary clashes of warlike humanity, offers ample reason why our feathered friends might unusually flock across species together against us. Fox doesn’t have to do too much to place us in Australia’s maddening environmental debate, with the soon-to-go-dead wireless alerting us that this is a global assault.
Twitchers will, of course, pounce upon local bird cameos, but other tweaks are more menacing. The nasally pinched Muriel, distrusting governments mandating lockdowns, spouts the originally satirical theory that birds are actually US spy drones in disguise, which was promptly embraced by the more cuckoo corners of the internet. The mere hint of a failed military rescue in the story is worked up into a flaming disaster here.
There’s power in Arundell’s words, unshakably clasping our attentions as Tessa describes, in alarming detail, the gradual escalation from finches tip-tapping at the window, like Emily Brontë’s spectral Cathy, through thousands of gulls riding the crest of stormy waters and on to skin-shredding birds of prey and a kamikaze gannet. Fox goes far further than du Maurier in describing the gory aftermath of one assault, in the show’s most horrific moment. However, in so doing, she stretches plausibility further than Tessa is allowed time to digest the morally murky consequences.
Sometimes Lutton’s direction undoes the drama, too, leaning heavily into tell over show. Despite the audio forward production, this is not a The War of the Worlds-like radio play – would listen – so when Tessa narrates fleeing the fury from above, it might make more sense for her to use her feet and actually run? Perhaps a thrust or in-the-round staging might have brought us closer to Arundell’s rising panic? These niggles aside, in a work that could stand to sink deeper into our skins, The Birds is a testament to her command of the craft. I know who’s side I want to be by when they come for us.
The Birds is showing at Beckett Theatre until June 7. For more information and to book tickets, head to the website.
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