Those of you who think that to enter Mississauga is to slump into a case of the doldrums, suspend your disbelief: Theatre Erindale has staged what could possibly be the best campus production of the year.
Laura Annawyn Shamas’s adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock, directed by Laurence Follows and performed by the graduating class of Erindale’s drama program, is a play marked by mysteries and encounters with the mystic. Based on the novel by Lady Joan Lindsay and set in Australia at the turn of the century, the play follows a group of young girls on a day trip from the distinguished Appleyard College to Hanging Rock.
Three of these girls decide to explore the upper limits of the rock, forbidden territory to the likes of them. Along with their elderly math teacher, they mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth, plunging Appleyard College into deep disrepute. A lone survivor is found months later, with no memory of what happened to her or the other women on the rock.
In between her disappearance and her miraculous rescue, the many faces of man-or should I say, woman (a scant six men appear in the cast of 20)-are peeled back to reveal the terrifying depths of human nature, the constraints of memory and knowledge, and the spiritual communion of women with the land and each other.
A spectacular cast surmounts the inherent difficulties in making this play accessible to a modern audience-after all, upper-class Australia at the beginning of the 20th century was still governed by a rigid Victorian code inherited from their British colonizers, a far cry from the society viewers are familiar with.
Director Laurence Follows (a member of the famous Canadian drama clan-his sister is Megan of Anne of Green Gables fame) whose credits include a degree in drama from Juilliard and producing the Broadway hit STOMP in Toronto and Vancouver, more than proves himself. He deciphers the more ambivalent aspects of the work to such a fine degree that the performance is entirely cogent and evocative, although the central evanescence and elusiveness of the play is preserved.
In the end, the audience is left full of unanswered questions, the answers to which they can only guess at from the random and widely scattered clues they have been given by Follows. He leaves the intangible mysteries of life and the Hanging Rock disappearances floating in thin air, forcing his audience into resignation before the inscrutibility of fate. His rendition of Picnic at Hanging Rock is almost Dionysian-a mix of the frightening, fantastic, and the even more terrifying realities of repression and denial-indeed, a sight to be seen.
