In the face of catastrophe, do we hope? How can we live?

That, in the smallest nutshell, was the question posed by novelist Nevil Shute in his 1957 best-seller On the Beach.

Set in Melbourne in 1963, the book describes the last few months of humankind in microcosm as the populace awaits the cloud of contaminated fallout that has already killed everyone, everywhere. A gloomy story, very much of its Cold War time, but a prescient one too, as we, five decades later, observe other anthropogenic catastrophes rolling across the globe.

Sydney Theatre Company’s On the Beach. Photo © Daniel Boud

Adapted by Tommy Murphy (Gwen in Purgatory, Holding the Man) and directed by Kip Williams, Sydney Theatre Company’s On the Beach opens with an idyllic image, a visual echo of Charles Meeres’ Australian Beach Pattern. After some minutes, the tableaux vivant is erased: a discordant rumble heralds the arrival of the cloud; a huge fabric sheet sweeps forward. Everything and everyone gone.

If you know the groundbreakingly pessimistic film of the book (released in 1959 and starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner), you’ll be already familiar with the key characters and the...