Theatre
The new Malthouse adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds powerfully conveys the estrangement of the familiar that is the essence of horror. By Alison Croggon.
Horror of the uncanny at Malthouse’s The Birds
In one of those weird zeitgeisty moments, this year Melbourne is hosting two adaptations of Daphne du Maurier stories. Her moody gothic novel Rebecca is scheduled for the Melbourne Theatre Company in September, while her short story The Birds, the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s film, is now on at the Malthouse Theatre.
It’s not surprising that du Maurier’s work is so often adapted – it has an instinctive sense of theatricality. Maybe this stems from her upbringing. She grew up in London among a family of artists and writers; her father was the actor–manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and her mother, Muriel Beaumont, was an actor. Like many women authors, du Maurier was often dismissed during her life as a “romance writer”, an appellation she hated. Her work is in fact diverse, ranging from fiction to plays to biographies, and even her lighter works have grim undercurrents. This darkness comes to the fore in short horror works such as Don’t Look Now (1971), which was adapted for film by Nicolas Roeg in 1972, and The Birds.
Louise Fox’s adaptation takes zero account of Hitchcock’s film, which changed pretty much everything except du Maurier’s central premise of every bird species on Earth murderously ganging up on human beings. The landscape of the short story is an unnamed coastal village, probably in Cornwall where du Maurier spent childhood holidays and most of her adult life. In Fox’s version, we understand we are in a small Australian coastal town: as in the story, the specifics are deliberately vague. The only substantial changes from the original are that the central protagonist is not the war veteran farmer but his wife, and Fox introduces a few minor characters and some body horror.
The Birds is Matthew Lutton’s last production for the Malthouse before he takes up his new job as artistic director of the Adelaide Festival. It echoes his 2019 staging of Wake in Fright, adapted by Declan Greene, which also employed a remarkable solo actor, Zahra Newman, to channel contemporary anxieties through a classic work of fiction. Rather than deconstructing the original story through some shamanistic theatricality, as in Greene’s approach, Fox imaginatively expands it, changing little of its essential structure. In the process we lose some of du Maurier’s bitterly efficient economy of style but, on the other hand, it becomes an excellent vehicle for Paula Arundell’s compelling performance.
What matters in both du Maurier’s and Fox’s narratives is ordinariness. We are given a picture of a family – a man (Nat), his wife (in the adaptation named Tessa) and their two children, Johnny and Jilly – who are going about the unremarkable rhythms of their daily lives when they are struck by an inexplicable and rapidly escalating catastrophe.
At the core of horror (and, not coincidentally, of poetry) is the estrangement of the familiar. Turning the lens slant from literal reality can open its unknowability – its danger, uncanniness and beauty – and allows the expanse of metaphor to flower in the imaginations of the audience. Published in 1952, seven years after World War II, The Birds is a particularly fine example of this effect: everything in it is immediately familiar, aside from the behaviour of the birds. It makes palpable a generalised sense of fear – like that of a world at war. As a consequence, the story has lost nothing of its power in the decades since it was written.
This sense of estranged familiarity is mostly carried in the stage production by J. David Franzke’s sound design, which is delivered intimately through lightweight headphones. I confess when I saw the headphones on the seats my heart sank: I wondered if we were in for a night of empty, high-tech cleverness. But the three-dimensional sound design is simple, immersive and very effective, despite a drift sometimes towards being merely illustrative. It’s a reminder of how powerful hearing is in constructing our realities.
Perhaps the most admirable and effective aspect of this production is its restraint: aside from the aforementioned moment of body horror, which I still feel undecided about, it’s a low-key, almost monochrome affair. Kat Chan’s design builds a small stage in the middle of the space, around which are elements suggestive of windows, doors and so on. Above, a little incongruously to my mind, is suspended a host of birdhouses – the birds in the story are, after all, far from domestic. The important thing is its sparseness, which focuses our attention wholly on Arundell.
Arundell, as with other virtuoso solo performances such as Eryn-Jean Norvill’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, plays every character, including the narrator. The shifts between character are indicated minimally – a turn of the head, a lowering of the vocals – and at first I found it slightly awkward. But once I adjusted to the conceit, it felt seamless and I was lifted effortlessly into the narrative.
Sweeps of lyrical description, largely taken from du Maurier – whitecaps on the sea that turn out to be battalions of gulls, unusual winds – are interleaved with dialogue and action extrapolated from the text. The escalating violence, from the initial attacks by finches and robins to deadly targeting by gannets and raptors, is indicated with lightning flashes, sound and Arundell’s physical responses as she flinches, covers her face, falls over.
Along with the violence comes a sense of increasing isolation. Tessa is the realist who understands first, in the face of her neighbours’ scepticism, that something serious is happening. The outside world retreats as radio and phone communication cuts off and attempts at army rescue fail. Yet very little happens in this story – walks to a bus stop for school pick-up, a visit to a neighbour, the efforts to make the house safe from invasion. It’s an unsensational picture of a family under siege, barricaded inside their house, trying to survive the unimaginable.
Like du Maurier, Lutton and team offer no explanation, although we are invited to guess why the birds “hate us”. Also like the original story, we see glimpses of how communities react under threat, the tendencies towards conspiracy theory or outright denial.
Uncanny weather is a constant in both, and these days it has an extra charge. I kept thinking of an anonymous viral quote that sums up the sense of oncoming, unavoidable dread that this production manifests: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 31, 2025 as "Flocks by night".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
