Olivia DeJonge on Picnic at Hanging Rock’s urgent retelling

It doesn’t matter if you’ve worked with Baz Luhrmann and M. Night Shyamalan and acted alongside Toni Collette and Colin Firth. The stage is its own democratic force and every actor, no matter how famous, is exposed to the same challenges.

On opening night of Sydney Theatre Company’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Olivia DeJonge turned to her castmate, Kirsty Marillier, panicked. “I was like, ‘I can’t remember my first line, I can’t remember my first line’.

“She just looked at me and she’s like, ‘Yes, you do’, and I was like, ‘No, I don’t remember my first line’. She said, ‘Stop it, you are fine, get up there’.”

It was DeJonge’s, an AACTA winner for her role as Priscilla Presley in Elvis, first time on stage and even though she had been learning her lines for six months, in the moment, the jitters came on.

“I wanted to do theatre for a long time but had never really figured out how to get in there, because, especially in Australia, I didn’t study (at drama school).

“I had actually auditioned for STC two years ago and I didn’t get the part and I thought I had completely messed it up. I thought that I had failed, that I missed the boat and I was never going to have the opportunity to work with them.

“When this came through, I was like, ‘I have to do anything that I can to be part of it. I was definitely scared but I was definitely down for the challenge.”

DeJonge’s castmates, who had experience on the stage, were there to support her and each other, especially in a production that relies so heavily on its five actors to be in lock step with each other’s rhythms. One piece of advice: breathe together.

Adapted by Tom Wright and directed by Ian Michael from Joan Lindsay’s iconic novel which had previously been turned into a film by Peter Weir, a veritable classic of Australian New Wave cinema.

The story looms large in the country’s cultural history – “It’s hard to grow up in Australia without understanding Picnic at Hanging Rock,” DeJonge said.

Lindsay’s novel was published in 1967 and even now, it persists that the fictional story is rooted in local legend, that there really had been a private girls school excursion to Victoria’s Macedon Ranges on Valentine’s Day in 1990, from which two young women and their teacher never returned.

This STC production exploits the eeriness of Lindsay’s myth-making. Whereas Weir leaned into an ethereal vibe, Wright’s play borders on horror, refocusing the tale on the fraught relationship between colonialists and the land.

“It’s so much about our history and Australia as a country, and the people who live in it are now only in the past 10 years truly waking up to our history of colonisation and lack of relationship to the land,” DeJonge said.

“This adaptation is so important, especially as it’s retelling it now through the eyes of (Noongar man) Ian Michael, who truly is one of Australia’s most exciting up-and-coming directors. It’s an important retelling of a traditionally very white story.”

Each actor plays multiple characters through the production but DeJonge’s primary role is that of Mrs Appleyard, the headmistress. “She’s the colonising force in this story, she represents control, constraint, tension, perfection and rigidity within own’s own instinct. And, also, ignorance,” the actor said.

“She represents the unravelling of all that, and a sort of surrender to the world. What happens when someone who is obsessed with control and only knows control is put into a situation where they have none.

“You cannot tame mother nature and you cannot tame young girls.”

Lindsay’s novel famously had a chapter excised on the advice of her editor. Those pages were then published posthumously decades later. It explains what happened to the missing trio, but also punctuates the mystery of the story that kept it so forefront in the popular imagination.

The STC play does not stage that missing chapter but it certainly leans into the story’s supernatural elements. If you know the story, it’s hard not to read into it. If you don’t know – and would prefer to keep it that way – it’s a spooky tease.

DeJonge loved the approach. “I always enjoy the mythical, supernatural and otherworldly forces in stories. The world is full of mystery, especially in nature and mother nature. There’s a lot about her we don’t know.

“It’s that rejection of rigid Victorian, western values, and an open-endedness to the ‘what if’. It’s greater than ourselves, and bleeds into the power of the land.”

Picnic at Hanging Rock is playing at the Sydney Opera House until April 5