Review: Picnic at Hanging Rock, Ilkley Playhouse

WHEN a play is adapted from a novel and when that novel has been made into a well-known film, it’s hard not to enter a theatre with certain expectations.

However, in the same way that a painting shouldn’t be like a photograph, something other than what is expected is rather more interesting and adds another dimension to this mysterious story.

Directed by Stephen Mason, Picnic at Hanging Rock at Ilkley Playhouse this week is the tale of school girls, who go missing in the Australian outback during an outing. Set in 1900, this modern take on the story, draws on the many mentions of time in the play and makes it a story for all time. Told in a very stylised – and stylish – manner by five actors, the piece opens revealing the narrators in a line, in school uniform and they tell the story. Without any movement for the first twenty minutes, the lyrical language of the piece is enabled to sing – and sing it does.

The cast, Charlotte Armitage, Felicity Woodhouse, Becky Hill, Ellen O’keeffe and Aisling Walsh, slip seamlessly into a range of accents to highlight the characters they portray, telling the story from a range of view points and conveying the action so vividly that the picnic, its heat, the repressive atmosphere and the wilfulness of the girls, are tangible.

When at last they break out of formation the story takes on a different pace and the characters become more fully fleshed and so too the relationships between them. Felicity Woodhouse, as Mrs Appleyard, makes a wonderfully mean spirited, tight laced school mistress, clipped and unsympathetic to the plight of her charges. Becky Hill’s Irma is clearly mind-altered by the experiences she’s had in the outback and has clearly lost the relationship she had with her friends, whilst the relationship between Charlotte Armitage’s Michael and Aisling’s Albert is at once homoerotic and sinister.

An intense vulnerability is embodied by Ellen O’Keeffe, whilst moments of fear and suspicion are accentuated by eerie sound effects and disembodied humming.

Words projected on to the screen at the back of the stage serve to add to the mystery – ‘Committed to memory’, ‘Missing presumed dead’ and these are complemented by repeated phrases in the text, notably ‘There is no answer’ - and this is the ending….. Thought mistakenly by many to be a true story, it remains a provocative tale and one which will continue to fascinate audiences.

It runs until Saturday.

* All tickets £10. Please book online at ilkleyplayhouse.co.uk