Melbourne Theatre Company’s new production of Rebecca is a sensation. This tight, gripping play leaves audiences with a chill running down their spine.
The play is a new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca, by Melbourne Theatre Company’s Artistic Director Anne-Louise Sarks. A young woman, unnamed, is working for an elderly American woman when she meets Maxim de Winter, an older, grieving widower.
He is attracted to her simplicity and naïveté, and they quickly marry. He whisks her back to his ancestral home of Manderley, where the memory of his beloved late wife Rebecca haunts friends and staff, particularly housekeeper Mrs Danvers.
Sarks’ direction is exceptional. She excavates the key emotional beats and characters from a long and complex novel, succeeding where film adaptations have failed in conveying the waking-nightmare quality of du Maurier’s text. This isn’t garish, untethered gothic horror. There are no literal ghosts; the real terror comes from within.
Instead, Sarks chillingly highlights the psychological damage wrought on women when their choices are deeply constrained. The tight two-hour, intermission-free runtime provides an unrelenting window into their slow descent, prisoners of the roles they’ve been assigned.
Nikki Shiels is masterful as the unnamed Mrs de Winter. Her character is less the ingénue, more a hopeful and practical young woman attempting to make the best of the cards life has dealt her. Shiels’ physicality over the course of the play, conveying the character’s maturing and incipient dread, is impressive.
Pamela Rabe is simply phenomenal as Mrs Danvers. Her presence on stage is remarkable – always looming, always in control, even with few words and impassive features. She brings a remarkable depth and complexity to this character who can so easily be simply the villain of Rebecca. Rabe conveys the strength of Danvers’ love and the madness of her grief. Her tears, when they come, are spine-tingling.
Stephen Phillips and Toby Truslove complete the four-part cast. Phillips plays Maxim, while Truslove plays Frank, the estate manager at Manderley, and Jack, Rebecca’s cousin. Both are excellent, with Truslove’s repulsive caddishness as Jack particularly memorable.
In a book as famous for its moody environment as anything (its iconic first line, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,’ capturing the house’s all-consuming power over all of the characters), setting is everything.
Marg Horwell’s set and costume design is exquisite. The play moves through a series of stylised tableaux – a hotel restaurant, a breakfast table, an armchair, a bedroom. Each is evoked minimally, but with beautiful attention to small details – the drape of cloths over mannequins, the profusion of flowers against a black background.
The sound design, by Grace Ferguson and Joe Paradise Lui, is also beautiful, creative, yet unobtrusive, adding to the taut mood and sense of foreboding at every turn.
Rebecca is an exceptional piece of theatre, one of the finest to grace Australia’s stages this year. It is a sophisticated adaptation that lets the work hang in its complexities and subtleties. It deserves wide approbation and an even wider audience.
Rebecca runs to 5 November at the Southbank Theatre, The Sumner. 140 Southbank Boulevard, Southbank.
Tickets: https://tickets.mtc.com.au/production/18872
Website: https://www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/whats-on/season-2025/rebecca/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/melbtheatreco/
Photo credits: Pia Johnson
