We’ve been thinking about the end of the world for a long time – this is one notion that keeps recurring to me regarding On the Beach. Nevil Shute’s novel was first published in 1957 – 12 years after the atomic age was inaugurated in the New Mexico desert, and while these days our impending Armageddon seems to be of a non-nuclear variety, the fact that the Sydney Theatre Company’s stage adaptation (the first ever for this story) is launching the same week that Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer debuts in cinemas speaks to the long shadow thrown by the blast at Los Alamos.
Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film adaptation is steeped in the same Cold War nuclear anxiety as Shute’s book, while Russel Mulcahey’s 2000 television movie is a solid take on the material that feels oddly out of kilter with its cultural context – released in the relatively calm period immediately presaging 9/11, the Global War on Terror, and an entirely different flavour of paranoia than what had gone before.
Perhaps the nature of the catastrophe is unimportant, only its seeming inevitability.
Directed by STC artistic director Kip Williams and penned by Tommy Murphy (ABC's Significant Others, Holding the Man), this version retains the original setting (Melbourne), period (1963), and existential threat (nuclear fallout drifting southward following a brisk war in the Northern Hemisphere). However, with this production being mounted as global temperature records are routinely obliterated and the tangible effects of the climate crisis are ignorable only for the deluded or the vested, this staging is very much about our current horrible moment. Perhaps the nature of the catastrophe is unimportant, only its seeming inevitability. In the ‘50s, nuclear annihilation seemed like a dead cert. In the 2020s – well, you know, you’re not dumb.
The audience’s task here is to simply sit with the play’s characters and bear witness as they grapple with the implacable truth of their own imminent demise. It’s a slow apocalypse, and so social systems remain largely in place even as cities to the north “go out” one-by-one as a vast radioactive cloud overtakes them. The presence of a US Navy submarine, the Scorpion, and a muddled radio signal emanating from the Pacific Northwest, provides some narrative shape as Commander Dwight Towers (Tai Hara) leads a last-ditch expedition to hunt down what may be evidence of human survival above the equator. Australian naval liaison Lieutenant Peter Holmes (Ben O’Toole) clings to any scrap of hope – after all, he has a wife, Mary (Michelle Lim Davidson), and a baby daughter. Civilian scientist John Osborne (Matthew Backer, providing the bulk of the play’s scant comedy) entertains no such illusions. Mary quietly makes enquiries about when they might expect the government to start distributing suicide pills.
For his part, Towers is reluctant to enter into a relationship with local party girl Moira (Contessa Treffone), who has embraced hedonism in the face of oblivion. He cites his wife and children back home. We know they’re dead; he takes a while to catch up.
Tonally, On the Beach starts off a little odd, a little stagey – the performances are pitched a little high, period language fits uncomfortably in the mouths of the cast, costumes and props feel like, well, costumes and props. But as options narrow, hope drains away, and the inevitability of extinction becomes impossible to ignore, this gives way to an almost unbearable sense of grief, and we come to realise that in the early movements what we’ve been watching are the characters performing normalcy in the face of catastrophe, and if their grins are a little rigid and their jocularity a little forced, well, who can blame them?
As the story progresses the raw emotion that is revealed is so powerful – and powerfully discomfiting – that the artificiality of the first act seems preferable. Which is, I think, the point – how we cling to behavioural conventions and societal norms in the face of disaster, even when those things have well and truly run out their string.
As a director, Williams is known for his bold and inventive “cine-theatre” approach, as used to excellent effect in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but there’s little of his trademark showiness here, instead opting for a stripped-back, sparse approach. Michael Hankin’s set is dominated by a raised platform that serves as everything from a jetty to a submarine, while a vast, billowing white sheet reminds us of the toxic cloud inexorably approaching. There’s an argument to be made that the best storytelling techniques are invisible, regardless of medium, and considerable craft has gone into forefronting the performances over the form here.
The result is a harrowing and often uncomfortably intimate theatrical experience – not quite a dirge, but certainly an elegy, and one that guides us, step by step, to a place of sorrow and acceptance where we, like its characters, can discover what we’re left with when everything else is taken away.
On the Beach plays at Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay, until August 12, 2023. Tickets range from $65-$129 and you can snap them up over here.
