On the Beach

New Australian plays rarely win the sort of epic production treatment given here to Tommy Murphy’s stage adaptation of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach. But it’s a big story, nothing less than about the end of the world – as nuclear fallout from an annihilated northern hemisphere advances on Melbourne in 1963.

Kip Williams’ brilliant production mostly spans the global and local challenges in Murphy’s drama, below water on the USS Scorpion charting the devastation and merest hints of life up north, while at home Melbournians take to drink and tears, or turn stoic and beat the end by suicide.

A long central rostrum effectively serves as the submarine as well for domestic and social settings, garlanded sometimes with bougainvillea, slicing through Michael Hankin’s otherwise open space. It’s often the sea but its emptiness also chills as the play’s existential horror grows, under Damien Cooper’s expressive lighting. 

It begins on the beach, a prelude, as Aussies lie in the sun (in Mel Page’s 1950’s swimwear), until they rise staring at a deadly white cloud sweeping over them.  We know today what this is. Murphy’s play arrives at just the right time; our anxieties now primed by epidemic, expanding environmental devastation, droughts, floods and an overflowing war in The Ukraine reviving nuclear threats.

But central here, and certainly to the book and the 1959 film with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, are the characters of the upright US Captain Dwight Towers (Tai Hara) and the exuberantly flirtatious Moira (Contessa Treffone). The approaching white cloud is oddly  forgotten by them and us as Murphy relishes their romance and banter. Another couple, the Australian liaison officer (Ben O’Toole) and his wife (Michelle Lim Davidson) are torn between his gung-ho optimism and her pragmatism and sorrow for her new baby. Their alarm is real but their rapport less natural.

Murphy writes beautifully emotional and witty language and reveals his story – and this unavoidable catastrophe – only in slow steps, perhaps too gradually.  And because we’re talking about the end of the world, not surprisingly the detail sometimes overpowers.

His narrative however is spread artfully to other fine characterisations, like the submariner (Elijah Williams) who swims ashore to die with the rest in his American hometown, the bespectacled CSIRO scientist (Matthew Backer) who buys a Ferrari, and Vanessa Downing shining in many roles.

Murphy has enriched the story by giving more agency to Shute’s female roles, who were left diminished by the novelist.  Emma Diaz, Alan Zhu and Tony Cogin also give able support.

A standout contribution is the sweeping and mournful compositions from Grace Ferguson, matched with Jessica Dunn’s sound design.

Williams’ direction of On the Beach also incudes some beautiful vignettes, stunning choreographic reveals and  flashing moments of memory which make this march to the end of the world a journey worth taking – at least on stage.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Daniel Boud.