Review: Beyond the Neck

I remember quite well the afternoon and evening of 28 April 1996 ... and the days that followed. The Sunday seemed to be rolling along quite normally in Hobart, where I was working as features editor for The Mercury ... lunch, a couple of beers, finishing off the weekend papers, watching a bit of football on the box ... when suddenly normal transmission was interrupted to report that all hell had broken loose at Port Arthur.

I wasn’t rostered on for work that day but, like quite a few others, I made my way to the office anyway. The story was obviously huge, we knew that all help would be appreciated, and anyway, you probably know how hard it is to keep a journalist at bay when there’s a sniff of a major breaking story in the breeze.

The office was news central that evening. We had to get our own paper to bed, to file material for our News Ltd affiliates, to communicate with behind-the-lines reporters in days when mobile phones were relatively scarce, to answer phone queries from around Australia and the world.

The most bizarre call came from the editor of an American gun magazine. He wanted to know what sort of gun had been used so he could do a story on its kill efficiency. He was told where to shove his magazine in a way that only a seasoned sports reporter could have done.

We ran on adrenalin that night and the impact of 35 people shot dead and numerous injured didn’t really start to sink in till the next morning. In a place the size of Hobart you’re almost bound to have some connections to victims of that scale of massacre.

One of them — quite possibly the first person murdered — worked in our advertising department, but I didn’t really know him at all.

Another was Jason Winter, a young New Zealand winemaker who’d arrived in Hobart a few months earlier to work at Moorilla Estate. I’d met him a couple of times and the weekend before (or it may have been the weekend before that) I’d shared a picnic lunch with him, his wife and their two-year-old son on the winery’s lawns. I remember how excited he was about the prospect of visiting Port Arthur and immersing himself in its history. He’s part of the history now, having died there heroically, successfully shielding his wife and son.

I remember that for months afterwards in public places I always checked to see if I had an escape route.

I remember, also, talking afterwards to a couple of friends who owned a popular local restaurant where I ate a couple of times a month. They told me the perpetrator, Martin Bryant, had been a regular there, too, and that he’d often said he loved eating at their restaurant because it was always so full of people.

Tasmanian-born playwright Tom Holloway was only a pup when Bryant added so resoundingly to Port Arthur’s tragic history, but the depth and intensity of Beyond the Neck, written a decade after the massacre, shows a remarkably keen sense for what the community had gone through and, more importantly, what it was still trying to come to grips with.

Watching his play at Belvoir Downstairs vividly brought back April and May 1996 and provided my first experience of this undoubtedly significant new literary talent.

Not that Beyond the Neck is directly about the Port Arthur massacre, though at first it well could be. Are the four characters — the boy (Jamie Croft), the teenage girl (Anna Houston), the young mother (Anita Hegh) and the older man (Lex Marinos) — flashing back to 28 April 1996? Are they all on some fateful journey that will bring them face-to-face with Bryant? Were they all there that day?

No. Beyond the Neck is set well and truly in the aftermath and is really much more about dealing with loss, about grieving, about coming to terms with life-changing experiences than it is about historical narrative.

Holloway has described his play in terms of a musical quartet and certainly the four characters do bounce off each other in a similar way, sometimes telling their own stories, sometimes chiming in to complete another’s flow of thoughts and actions, sometimes all talking at once, a bit like singers would perform a song in the round.

The musicality of the performance is strengthened immensely by composer Steve Toulmin’s evocative musical score, which he performs live on piano.

It is very complex, provocative theatre performed on one of the simplest of stage settings — half a dozen or so lumps of hewn sandstone that serve admirably as a representation of Port Arthur.

None of the quartet really want to be at Port Arthur, but it’s obviously an important part of their life’s journey, and they want to share that journey with the audience. The actors are on stage as we take our seats. They exchange glances and a few words with us. They make us feel comfortable about listening to their stories,

For the older man, there’s an element of Groundhog Day. He’s a tour guide at the former penal settlement and was there on the day of massacre. He’s still haunted by the events, keeps imagining gunshots and would love to clear his head of some heavy baggage.

Lex Marinos is good, but not totally convincing, occasionally slipping into the melodramatic when a more subtle approach to portraying fear and confusion might have been more appropriate.

The teenage girl lost her father in the massacre and deeply resents her mother remarrying to her father’s best friend. She has convinced herself that the whole Bryant story is a cover up for something much more sinister. For her, the forced visit to Port Arthur is a necessary reality check.

Anna Houston gives a resounding performance in the role and, for me, certainly took top honours on the night. I saw her early this year in another Bambina Borracha production, Hammerhead (Is Dead), and have her pigeon-holed as a rapidly rising star.

The young mother has been put on a “geriatric” Tasmanian mystery tour to help her get over the tragic deaths of her husband and child in a road accident. She’s certainly not convinced that Port Arthur’s smell of death and tragedy will further her recovery.

Well established stage and television performer Anita Hegh is absolutely convincing in this role, as is the very youthful-faced James Croft in his as the exuberant, but very troubled young boy.

The boy is the most perplexing and disturbing of the quartet — ill at ease with parents obsessed with their own lives and seemingly disinterested in his life; carrying relationships with imaginary friends to the extreme and also carrying a pretty dark secret. Is it drawing too long a bow to imagine parallels with a young Martin Bryant? Or is that my own relish for conspiracy getting out of hand?

Beyond the Neck is a wonderful piece of imaginative dramatic writing. Director Iain Sinclair has woven together some great acting and staged a memorable performance. Keep your eye on all the names involved.

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