When Alfred Hitchcock adapted Daphne du Maurier’s gothic thriller Rebecca, he had to make some changes to the book due to the strict guidelines of the Hays Production Code that ruled over Hollywood at the time. The office of the Code described the original story as “a clear violation of the Production Code, since it apparently justifies and condones murder”. Their central issue with the story was the fact that the lead male character, Maxim de Winter, murdered his first wife and is allowed to get away scot free. Hitchcock had two choices: punish Maxim or make the death accidental. He went with the second.
Much of the
last third of Hitchcock’s film is a procedural, including coroner's inquest and interviews of others who knew he wife, Rebecca. Though Maxim has confessed
to his new wife – the unnamed second Mrs de Winter, who is the narrator of the
novel – that the circumstances were accidental, there is some lingering
doubt left in the audience’s mind. Like many other films in his oeuvre, Hitch spends
a lot of time figuring out how to exonerate Max from the crime which he cannot
definitely prove he didn’t commit. Rebecca was the only film in his
career that was awarded the Best Picture Academy Award, but in some ways it’s an imperfect film, hampered by this change.
Du Maurier
considered the novel to be a “study in jealously” and it’s much more deliberately murky when it
comes to the motivations of each of the characters. Unbound by the motion picture's
shoehorned-in morality, du Marier exorcises some personal demons: she was
jealous of her husband’s former fiancée, believing him to be still in love with
her. She also found the process of writing the novel particularly difficult;
she threw out the first 15,000 words calling it a “literary miscarriage”.
The novel
was hugely popular on first release. Du Maurier turned the story into a stage
play herself, which debuted the year after the book was first published. The
Hitchcock film appeared another year later – his second du Maurier adaptation
after Jamaica Inn in 1939. He would later make a film version of her
short story “The Birds”, but in that case his radical changes were based on personal
preference. The Hays Code was long gone by then.
Melbourne
Theatre Company’s new version of Rebecca, adapted and directed by
Artistic Director Anne-Louise Sarks, is a chamber piece that echoes around the
Sumner Theatre. Four actors, all playing multiple roles – apart from Nikki
Shiels, who is exceptional in the central role of narrator, the second Mrs de
Winter.
Early
scenes of the play, including the comical preamble with Mrs Van Hopper (Pamela
Rabe), are minimalist in set design – a table and chair here, a fountain there –
and we trip through numerous short scenes with the help of large black “flats”
flying in and out, along with Paul Jackson’s very measured lighting design that
allows actors to float in and out of focus. Occasionally everything disappears
in perfectly judged black outs. And the creeping dread sets in.
After Max
(Stephen Phillips) makes the narrator his second wife and returns them to his
estate, Manderley, the characters rattle around the echoing mansion with barely
any set dressing in sight. A mostly black stage and characters staring deeply
into the auditorium suggests entering and exiting cavernous rooms.
Here we
meet Mrs Danvers (also Rabe), who was lady’s maid to the first Mrs de Winter,
Rebecca. Max insists that Danvers is there to help his new wife settle in and,
indeed, though she seems to appear out of nowhere on several occasions, she
is doing her job. The conflict between Danny and the
new wife is the central drama in this new adaptation; there’s no question of
Max’s guilt over the murder of Rebecca, though some of the details of how and
why still have to be unpicked and unpacked, as in the original novel.
This production
begins as a slow burn. Just as with the book and the film, the play opens with the narrator relating a dream: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”. It’s
as haunting a start as any and it’s a treat to hear Shiels recite some of du Maurier’s
rich text. The set-up in Monte Carlo is humorous and the show slides
effortlessly between narration and dramatic scenes, so we get a full sense of
the world early on.
Parts of the
show suffer from dialogue and situations that came across, at least on opening
night, as funnier than I would have expected. The way Max treats the central
character feels less like an insight into gender dynamics of the time and more
like a parody of conventions in gothic literature. It’s hard to know whether
performances could be calibrated to fix this reaction, because these tropes are
so well-known to modern audiences, it might always be hard for us to take them
seriously.
But as the
show progresses, and the psychological terror starts to build, any concerns I
had were whisked away. Sarks clearly has her sights on where her adaptation
has been headed from the beginning. The central space of Rebecca’s bedroom – a place
the second Mrs de Winter is cautioned against visiting – becomes a
place of showdown and revelation. Gone is the striking, startling minimalism of
earlier scenes to be replaced by set pieces that centre us firmly in a space that
Mrs Danvers and Max have treated as a museum since Rebecca died.
Tony Award-winning
designer Marg Horwell creates an intimate room with a rich maroon carpet and a
bed dead centre, across which is draped Rebecca’s silk nightgown. A closet and
a make-up table sit to one side. On the other, dress mannequins covered in
sheets that suggest spirits; the spectres of the past haunting the house and
the second Mrs de Winter.
Above the
space is an oval mirror that allows the audience to see everything in the room
from above. It’s disconcerting. Both we and the central character’s
perspectives are shifted as she enters the room. Things only get more
complicated from here. Shiels and Rabe’s best work is in this section of the play, including an almost
wordless scene where Mrs Danvers helps Max’s new wife to get ready for a ball –
slipping her into a purple dress which turns her into the spitting image of Rebecca.
Time
fractures at this point and we start to experience the present and the past at once.
Vines drape down into the bedroom and across the bed, echoing the early
description of Manderley being reclaimed by nature in the narrator’s dream.
Her fears become central – if Max wants to replace her, might she be fated to
follow Rebecca? What is driving Mrs Danvers to gaslight her? And now that
she is the new Mrs de Winter, might she gain some of the strength Max’s first wife
had?
After the
earlier sparse scenes, the gathering up of tension and the release in
revelation after revelation becomes increasingly disorienting. Jackson’s lighting keeps us off guard, while Grace Ferguson and Joe Paradise Lui’s score (subtle, almost imperceptible in the opening scenes) becomes bass-heavy and their sound design is heart-racing. Kudos also to the stagehands who are
whisking things on and off stage during the rapid blackouts to create a space
in flux. It’s unsettling in the best possible way.
Shiels is remarkable – taking the character from shy ingenue to a vastly more confident wife and lady of Manderley. Pamela Rabe is perfectly stoic as Mrs Danvers, a role that feels tailored for her. Stephen Phillips’s Maxim is perfectly gruff and Toby Truslove has fun with the more flamboyant supporting players of Frank and Jack.
Hitchcock
was always interested in the psychology of villains, but for Rebecca, where he was hamstrung by
the censors, he fell back on something he knew well – the wrongly-accused man-in-trouble.
Sarks is much more concerned about the psychology of women and her adaptation excavates
the passions of a central character that is pushed and pulled by the events in
the 1940 film. She also finds connections between the narrator and Mrs Danvers
and the world they are trapped in together. This version proposes an idea: what
if these two found common ground and worked together? If Danvers loved Rebecca so much and the
second Mrs de Winter is her replacement, why must they fight?
Despite
the incongruous laughter from the audience early on, the culmination of the drama in a stage spinning under a mirror in a room that
slowly flies apart in front out of eyes is a sequence of theatrical magic. Come for the commanding
performances of Shiels and Rabe and watch them at the centre of a production that is
executed by theatremakers at the height of their powers.
This is a dark, seductive jewel of a
production.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
Rebecca is playing at MTC's Southbank Theatre until November 5
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