Review: Rebecca at Melbourne Theatre Company

Review by Greg Gorton

Rebecca concerns the young un-named second wife of Maxim De Winter, and her arrival at his estate on the coast, Manderley. She arrives feeling threatened by the psychological spectre of his first wife, Rebecca, the people who miss her, and the mystery of her death. It is one of those novels that you cannot deny the title of “Classic English Literature”. Even looking beyond the gorgeous prose, you find timely messages about feminism, domestic abuse, and even the power landowners have over all around them. 

Rebecca has been adapted multiple times to varying degrees of success, including by Welles and Hitchcock. It is exciting in itself that MTC’s production will bring more people to consider reading Rebecca and discovering the wider oeuvre of Daphne du Maurier.

Stepping out of the production, however, I am left with the widest range of emotions I have felt for a long time about a work of theatre.

The most important thing to note is how spectacularly this production has been designed. The haunting music by Joe Paradise Lui and Grace Ferguson is, in my opinion, the element of this show that best reflects how I understand the concept of Manderley. An ever present symbol of the past, of the heated tension never washed away by the sea-blown wind. While Marg Horwell was clearly given too much money to spend on set design, what they have come up with brilliantly captures the early-twentieth-century English settings, and works to create one of the most Hollywood-like montages I’ve seen on stage. It almost (almost!) has me thinking revolving stages are worth it.

Horwell’s costume design is arguably more impressive. There is an immense feeling that these outfits we see were truly picked out by the appropriate character, and only Rebecca’s dress itself could I find fault with. Horwell’s remarkable skills also did much to help Pamela Rabe move seamlessly between her roles. Admittedly, though, Rabe would have been fine on her own - her performance, especially as Danvers, was inspired, and offered the character with the most presented complexity.

Horwell’s costuming also came to aide in attempting to convince us that Shiels was a young and impressionable woman, a role frankly unsuited for the star.

It makes some sense to cast Shiels, however, as writer/director Anne-Louise Sarks made an early decision to make much of the script out of full passages of the novel, and Shiels’ reading of these passages makes for compelling listening. Sarks makes other good choices in her written adaptation; it is difficult to know what parts of a story to leave on a cutting room floor with such adaptations and I found this to be near-perfect. This adaptation highlights the brutish nature of the men, and paints Mrs Danvers with a much more sympathetic brush than previous adaptations have.

The problem I faced with this production was in the direction and character choices. More specifically, I cannot believe that anyone would attempt to make a large part of one of the best gothic thrillers of all time into a comedy.

At first, I couldn’t believe it. I put it down to the enthusiastic opening-night crowd at MTC; they notoriously take the chance to find a joke in anything, and the opening scenes of this story can be found a little funny with the boisterous American Mrs Hopper, who has her eyes on the brooding Mr De Winter. But soon it became apparent that laughter was the aim of the first half of the play. Stephen Phillips’ De Winter isn’t quiet and brooding, but overly boorish (and not possibly attractive to anyone other than a gold-digger). Danvers comes on and off stage like Lurch, and Toby Truslove’s Jack might as well have stepped out of a bedroom farce (even to the very last scenes).

When the story goes dark, then, it is clear that neither actors or audiences know what to do. 

When the concept of the relationship between the protagonist and De Winter is treated as a sad joke, how then are we to be convinced that she cares if he loves or not? When the circumstances of Rebecca’s death are revealed to be connected to her relationships, how can an audience care? We certainly were not programmed to care about any previously established relationship.

I’m not sure I’ve explained quite what has gone wrong, only to say that the tone established in the first twenty minutes of this play doomed the final twenty and I’m not sure there would have been anything anyone could do. It almost has me forgetting all the minor mistakes that I cannot think an early rehearsal would miss - a very weird side plot about hair lengths, lines from the text no longer making sense in the context of performance, etc.

In the end, these flaws are too big for me. I’d consider buying a coffee table book of photos from this production, and would be first in line to have Shiels do an audiobook of  Daphne du Maurier’s work. I’d even be fascinated to see what Spark’s can do in writing adaptations of other literary greats, if she gives the scripts to someone else.

If you don’t have time for the book, or if the visual spectacle of theatre is what most drives you, Melbourne Theatre Company’s Rebecca could make your night. For lovers of du Maurier and those especially sensitive to poor tonal shifts, be grateful that Melbourne Fringe is on and there are plenty of other options out there.

Image Credit: Pia Johnson