Beyond the Neck depicts the impact of the Port Arthur massacre on four characters ten years on, based on interviews conducted with people who were touched by the events. The play demonstrates how Martin Bryant’s violent killing of 35 tourists and bystanders in Tasmania in 1996 had an enduring effect not only on those directly involved, but upon many others around the country for whom it became a touchstone for unexpected and senseless horror.
In writing a play inspired by the Port Arthur killings Holloway set himself an enormous challenge. How do you write about a massacre? He succeeded both in avoiding sensationalism and in honouring the experiences of the many people affected by the violence. The authenticity of the play largely lies in the fact that it is a piece of verbatim theatre and that it is styled as a set of interwoven monologues in which each character narrates their experience in their own voice. The boy, old man, young mum and teenage girl are the four lenses through which we see events, each speaking directly to us in a seemingly unmediated way.
This monologue-based style can be seen in Holloway’s other works, such as the acclaimed Red Sky Morning. Its downside in Beyond the Neck is that at times it slows down the pace of the drama and renders certain plot points hazy. However, it is a brilliant tool for documenting the characters’ isolation. Hearing each tell their own story separately displays the atomising effect of trauma, and the potential for each person’s reality to become detached – at times painfully – from the realities of others.
Yet Holloway also shows the small ways in which these voices interconnect. Although their stories are discrete, the characters interrupt each other in the telling, interjecting with added details or alternate histories, and sometimes confronting them with the past they are trying to evade.
Well-acted, with a restrained set and evocative score, the most powerful impression left by the play is of the human need to give and to receive comfort; the necessity of sharing grief and the impossibility of doing so. This is captured nowhere better than in the final line, spoken by the young boy:
“I want to tell them why I’m sad. But I can’t. Yet.”
In the years just after the Port Arthur massacre it might not have been possible, but 15 years later Beyond the Neck helps to find the words to commemorate an unspeakable tragedy.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Beyond the Neck
By Tom Holloway
Directed by Suzanne Chaundy
Cast: Roger Oakley, Philippa Spicer, Marcus McKenzie & Emmaline Carroll
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
March 16 – April 14
