Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 short story The Birds is a slim, frigid masterpiece of cold-war paranoia – a Cornish family besieged by avian flocks that, for reasons the author never deigns to explain, have collectively turned on humankind.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film famously took the premise and very little else, relocating the story to California and inflating it into Technicolor melodrama. Louise Fox’s new Australian adaptation, directed by Matthew Lutton for Malthouse Theatre and re-staged at Belvoir, sits somewhere between the two: faithful to du Maurier’s spare dread but transplanted to a contemporary Australian coastal town.
The transposition is the production’s most interesting decision and, frustratingly, its most half-committed. The story is set in Australia, but the birds named in dialogue are largely European. A ‘bin chicken’ reference late in the play – played for a laugh – feels less like genuine localisation than a wink. Why not commit? Cockatoos, kookaburras, currawongs and lorikeets would have given the production a specifically Australian terror.
A second creative choice does more damage. Fox and Lutton have given the entire play to a single actor: Paula Arundell, who plays Tessa (the wife and mother, unnamed in du Maurier’s original, here both named and given the lead) and every other voice in the story.
Arundell is a formidable stage presence and her Tessa is genuinely affecting – vulnerable, resilient, gradually transformed into something closer to a warrior. But asking her to also voice her gruff husband, her two young children and a clutch of minor characters is an ask too far.
The husband’s growled register and the children’s high, cracked voices come across as caricatures, and the audience laughed – not nervously, but openly – on at least half a dozen occasions.
These are laughs Lutton seems to want. But they are laughs the play cannot afford. They puncture the dread the play is working to build, and the production then has to claw that dread back from a deficit. It eventually does, but it shouldn’t have had to.
The Birds: one actor
Why the one-actor conceit? Transportability and cost are the obvious practical answers but neither rationale offers a creative justification and the choice ultimately constrains rather than liberates the material.
What does work (and works powerfully) is the sound design. Composer J. David Franzke and lighting designer Niklas Pajanti are the production’s twin engines, conjuring the birds through aural and visual means alone.
Sudden flashes accompany the attacks; low-hanging black shapes hover above the stage like something perched and waiting; tiny spotlights become watching eyes. It is genuinely effective theatre-making, and once the production settles into its own register – roughly halfway in – the menace is real.
Notably, there are no birds on stage at all. Lutton’s program note argues that ‘an audience can conjure something far more terrifying in their mind’s eye than a literal representation’. This is true up to a point, but it begins to sound like a creative cop-out.
By the same logic, why stage anything at all? Why not just hand the audience the script? A few projections, or feathers drifting down during the assault scenes, would have given the production something visual to anchor the imaginative work being asked of the audience.
Production publicity has framed this Birds as a parable for ‘an age with new anxieties’: climate breakdown, presumably, nature’s response to a species that has turned on it and the political inertia blocking real solutions. The reading is available if you want it but the production doesn’t quite earn it.
The Birds is a production of real ambition and considerable craft, particularly from its sound and lighting teams. But its central creative gambit – one actor, all the voices – comes at too high a cost.
There is, finally, a strange irony at the heart of this Birds: in a play about an overwhelming external threat, the production’s biggest problem is internal.
