Director's Note - Suzanne Chaundy | Beyond the Neck

The Port Arthur Massacre serves as a backdrop to this extraordinary chamber piece about rebuilding after tragedy. The four stories told in this delicate, poetic and quintessentially Australian text steer away from sensationalising the Port Arthur massacre and focus on the effects of loss and violence on people and their fragile journey towards healing. 

The play is set ten years after Martin Bryant shot and killed thirty-five people and wounded twenty more at Port Arthur  on the 28^th of April 1996. The team bringing you this new production had been reflecting how difficult it is to believe that this mass shooting happened 30 years ago, and how it can be that this story is not known by our younger generations. Sadly, everything came to light again following the horrific Bondi shootings on the 14^th of December 2025. Theatre Works had programmed Beyond the Neck before this dreadful event. The Bondi shootings has led to renewed national calls for stricter gun laws and a re-examination of the National Firearms Agreement created in reaction to the Port Arthur Massacre. 

Emma Ashton’s design reflects an island, and therefore the isolation of Tasmania and Port Arthur itself, which could only be accessed by the isthmus known to the locals as ‘The Neck’ (Eaglehawk Neck). Due to its isolation and difficult accessibility escape was almost impossible. It was a prison for convicts who re-offended after their transportation to the colonies used from the 1830’s to the 1880’s. An early form of solitary confinement was used in the Model Prison at Port Arthur.  It broke the minds of so many inmates that an asylum had to be built on the site.

The design reflects the strange stillness and contemplative beauty of the sandstone used throughout Port Arthur. We feature an enlarged reproduction of Tasmanian artist Rodney Pople’s Glover Award winning painting ‘Port Arthur’ as a background to the performance. This work depicts an anglicized Australia presented in a classical romantic style, reminiscent of a Constable surrounded by a foreboding darkness and  with a ghostly figure of Martin Bryant hovering in the foreground. It captures the colonisation as well as the beauty and the horror of the place, the darkness of its history and an ephemeral moment when one person had such a terrible impact on so many lives.  Port Arthur is featured in Australian writer Maria Tumarkin’s work ‘Trauma-scape’, an apt name for a place so steeped in atrocities.

The actors  are called upon to represent characters of a range of ages from seven to seventy-five (I hastily add the actors playing these extremes are not these ages!). They step out of these characters and become a chorus which helps each character tell their story by prompting, elaborating and even sometimes disagreeing about how it should be told. They begin our production seated like a string quartet. Subtitled  ‘A quartet on loss and violence’, Tom Holloway writes in his notes that it is “a piece of theatre which is perhaps closer to a musical quartet than a ‘straight’ play. It is a piece where rhythm and timbre play equal roles, perhaps equally as important as characterisation and narrative structure.” As much of my work is as an opera director, I absolutely relate to the musical nature of the writing of this work and the nuance this brings.  

This play speak to me deeply. I was thrilled when Producer Dianne Toulson approached me to direct it again after my 2012 production for Red Stitch Actors Theatre. This is a new production with some of the people involved in my first production revisiting it alongside me. Richard Vabre who was part of the 2012 team will create a new lighting design and we are revisiting composer Philip Mcleod’s haunting compositions. The wonderful Emmaline Carroll Southwell returns from the original cast alongside my new cast, the brilliant Francis Greenslade, Cassidy Dunn and Freddy Collyer.

READ MORE ABOUT BEYOND THE NECK AND BOOK YOUR TICKETS HERE