Theatre
Anne-Louise Sarks’ production of Daphne du Maurier’s subversive Rebecca swaps melodrama for an exploration of subjectivity. By Alison Croggon.
Shiels and Rabe shine in Anne-Louise Sarks’ Rebecca adaptation
Daphne du Maurier is one of those rare writers who straddle the realms of commercial and – less easily – literary success. Her most famous novel, Rebecca, has never been out of print since it was published in 1938 and has seen countless adaptations – most famously Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film. The very first was a radio version by Orson Welles in 1938. The latest is from Anne-Louise Sarks, artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company. It’s weirdly in the same year that Malthouse Theatre staged du Maurier’s The Birds – also famously adapted into a Hitchcock film – with Paula Arundell.
What is it about du Maurier that makes her work so ripe for the zeitgeist? I’d say it’s two conflicting things. First, in a time when theatres are forced to economic prudence, an enduringly popular title is an attractive proposition. Second, du Maurier is darkly subversive: a writer who well understood subtext, she brought to her work uneasy moral ambiguities that undermine any simple interpretation.
Her oeuvre’s popular gloss meant du Maurier has often been described pejoratively as a “romance novelist”. Rebecca was no exception: on its release it was described as a melodrama, with The Sunday Times calling it a “romance in the grand tradition”. The Times said dismissively that “the material is of the humblest ... nothing in this is beyond the novelette”, while the writer and critic V. S. Pritchett claimed, unhappily for him, it would be “here today, gone tomorrow”. There are shades here of the early reception to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which a contemporary critic dismissed as fit only for maidservants.
This of course ignores the dark, uncanny erotic tension that underlies the entire novel, as well as its psychological acuity. Like all good writing, it is multifaceted, bearing the capacity for many meanings.
Sarks has mainly refused the melodrama, choosing an almost literal interpretation of the novel, which is narrated in the first person by its unnamed protagonist. We are witnessing the evocation of subjective memory, its mixture of fantasy and reality, as summoned in the novel’s iconic opening passage: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...” This is as much evident in Marg Horwell’s set – a dark, cavernous space defined by swiftly moving flats – and Paul Jackson’s characteristically moody, precise lighting, as in the adaptation’s fragmentary vignettes. We are in the realm of the mind.
Early on the tension is set: our heroine, who will soon become the second Mrs de Winter (Nikki Shiels), artlessly exclaims that she wants to keep special moments in a bottle, so she can preserve memories forever. Maxim de Winter (Stephen Phillips), the rich, mysterious widower who sweeps her away with his brutal emotional unavailability, desires the opposite: he wants to forget every single thing about his past. She believes this is because he is still in love with his first wife, Rebecca, who died the year before in a boating accident. Of course, the real reason Maxim wishes to forget is much darker.
They meet in Monte Carlo, where she is a paid companion to the snobbish socialite Mrs Van Hopper (Pamela Rabe, marvellously outré in an absurd veil for the first of her three roles), who is on the lookout for celebrity and instantly gloms onto Maxim. In a pale blue cable knit jumper and shirt dress, Shiels is the awkward, girlish interloper on a privileged lifestyle she cannot hope to fit into. When Mrs Van Hopper decides to return to New York, Maxim unexpectedly proposes and our heroine finds herself plunged into a life that she hardly dared to imagine for herself: the wife of Mr de Winter and mistress of Manderley, a grand estate on the Cornish coast.
It’s obvious at the beginning, even through her dazzled eyes, that the new Mrs de Winter has merely swapped one form of indentured companionship for another. Her husband remains remote and uncommunicative. She is at a loss, ignorant of the social mores of the class she is suddenly supposed to have joined. She also knows nothing about Rebecca and populates the void with her febrile imaginings, helped along by the intimidatingly correct housekeeper, Mrs Danvers (Rabe), who was Rebecca’s servant from childhood and who jealously preserves her memory. Rebecca, the new Mrs de Winter learns, was everything she isn’t: beautiful, sophisticated, adored, socially adept, effortlessly mistress of the estate.
One of the great pleasures of this production, aside from its sumptuous visual beauty, is watching Shiels and Rabe on the same stage. They’re both magnificent in realising the ambiguities of their roles. We are watching a tale of possession, in several senses: Mrs de Winter’s haunting by the imagined ghost of Rebecca; Mrs Danvers’ real possession by her former mistress, whom she regards in the light of daughter and perhaps lover; the new Mrs de Winter’s hopeless desire to possess her husband and wrest him from the memory of Rebecca. To do this, she believes she must become Rebecca herself.
This creates an escalating state of erotic unease. A central scene, where Shiels enters Rebecca’s bedroom for the first time and is inducted by Mrs Danvers into Rebecca’s image – her negligee, unwashed since she died, her furs, her evening dresses – is at once funny and deeply unsettling. “Put your hands inside the slippers,” says Rabe softly, and pushes them onto Shiels’ hands, leaving her standing as if in a rabbit costume, comically helpless. Here Sarks makes the erotic subtext overt, as Danvers gently undresses Shiels like a doll and puts her in Rebecca’s dress: an apparent act of generosity that is aimed at the new Mrs de Winter’s ultimate humiliation.
As the production progresses, the scenes become more feverish, briefer and more surreal: seaweed curls up the posts of Rebecca’s bed, foreshadowing her death underwater, and an oval mirror above swings wildly. We rush towards the climax: Maxim’s confession that he hated Rebecca and that he murdered her, and Mrs Danvers’ burning down of Manderley. Rather than revulsion at the thought that her husband killed his first wife, Mrs de Winter feels glad, even exultant. Now, with this crime a shared secret between them, she is at last free of the ghost of Rebecca. Maxim, like the disabled Mr Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre, is bound to her forever.
It is, when you consider it, a profoundly bleak view of romantic love. What are we to make of a supposed ingenue who grows up when she blinks at murder? Was Rebecca the “moral filth” Maxim claimed, or was she in fact a woman who refused the stifling mores of her position and was unusually honest about it, only to receive the most brutal punishment? In any case, having got away with murder, our romantic couple is condemned to the purgatory of homelessness after losing Manderley, the defining possession of their lives. For them there is only the encroaching boredom of a peripatetic existence, where happiness depends entirely on forgetting.
Rebecca is playing at The Sumner, Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, until November 5.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 18, 2025 as "Realm of the mind".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
