You can see why Matthew Lutton chose Daphne Du Maurier’s 1952 short story, The Birds, to end his nine-year term as the Artistic Director of Malthouse Theatre.

Lutton has steered Malthouse through a tumultuous nine years, navigating slashed arts funding, a pandemic and the after-effects of slashed arts funding and a pandemic. Of the crop of theatre he watered during his tenure, it’s the large-scale interactive theatre productions (Because the Night, 2021) and the formally ambitious adaptations (Picnic at Hanging Rock, 2016), Cloudstreet (2019) and Solaris (2019) that best encapsulate his legacy: creative stagings of literary classics driven by multi-media immersion.

Paula Arundell in The Birds. Photo © Pia Johnson

In recent years, this drive has brought horror to Malthouse’s stages. It’s one of our only theatres to consistently invest in the genre. At the risk of putting the company off making the effort – which, as a horror fan, I applaud – the results have been mixed. Where Lutton’s sensibilities serve him well in more ruminative, poetic productions, horror theatre is a horse of a different colour. 

It’s a lack of stakes that derails Lutton’s staging of Du Maurier’s 1952...