THE BIRDS

Reading the du Maurier short story The Birds, two things were immediately apparent. The first was that a post-war, anxious, paranoid horror story about the revolt of nature could lend itself easily to a contemporary adaptation.  

The conceit of the birds also proved broad and resonant enough to reject one single interpretation. We were free to explore a range of community impacts of an unforeseen catastrophe and combine it with an intimate study of how we as individuals, respond. 

Secondly, it was clear the story had huge potential, theatrically. So, we placed one brilliant Olympian performer in Paula Arundell at the centre where she’s surrounded by a group of inspired theatre artists led by Matt Lutton (who has been great to collaborate with again). 

I hope all these elements combine to a create a heightened sensory experience, a visceral theatrical experience, and a deeply human one. 

I am writing this director’s note halfway through the rehearsal process of The Birds. Over the past two weeks, we have been working through Louise Fox’s brilliant adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story, simultaneously developing the storytelling with performer Paula Arundell and sound designer J. David Franzke. An unexpected aspect of these past weeks is that Paula has been rehearsing on crutches due to an injury (not bird related). However, this situation has provided us with the time to do the vital work that is required when preparing a solo performance such as this: imagining every character in the play and what they are doing physically onstage. This preparation then allows the lone performer to jump up and embody all of them simultaneously and switch between them at lightning speed. It demands an enormous amount of preparation.  

Daphne du Maurier’s story has a simple premise: on this day, birds of all species uniformly begin an assault on humankind. However, the driving questions of the narrative are ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’. How are the birds amassing, communicating, and planning? Why are they undertaking this unprecedented action? Perhaps the answers to these questions lie beyond our limited human understanding.  

The story is also a work of terror, designed to engage the audience through the adrenaline of fear and our instinctive responses of fight, flight, or fawn. Yet, amid the dread, there is also hope – particularly through the lens of a family, and one mother in particular, who confronts this crisis. Despite the scale of the assault, our story centres on a mother who refuses to deny the reality of the situation. She faces the threat and the truth head-on, asks questions, protects her family, and through her wisdom knows that external authorities will not send aid. Instead, she trusts her instincts and her intuition, overcomes her internal fears, and perseveres, even when the challenges seem immense.  

The other major characters in this narrative are the birds themselves. From the onset, we decided that the birds would not be depicted literally in this staging; a visual representation would be a disappointment for all. We know an audience can conjure something far more terrifying in their mind’s eye than a literal representation on stage. Therefore, we use sound as our means to prompt the audience's imagination and evoke the presence of the birds. It is not just any sound; we employ a binaural sound technology that recreates audio with a remarkable level of authenticity. Frequently in rehearsals, I find it difficult to distinguish between the birds in the sound design and the birds I can hear outside our rehearsal room, as both possess the same credibility. We are therefore pushing the boundaries in how we create sound for this production, aiming to elevate the audience's experience to a new level of vividness. 

Birds have always been a big part of sound design for me – they’re an excellent way of putting people in an environment and I have a lifetime of field recordings. When I was a kid, my dad was an officer in the Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands. He’d hear a bird while we were bushwalking together, whistle the exact bird cry, and the bird would call back to him. I always thought that was pretty cool.  

Each day during the rehearsal process I see and hear another bird I want to feature in the show – it's an anguish that there aren't enough hours in the day to record them all.

In this version of The Birds, sound is the vehicle that creates a lot of the drama, tension and visceral moments of pure terror. 

Binaural sound has been around for ages; it’s akin to a Victorian era party trick or a parlour gag. Almost as soon as we invented the notion of recording, we realised that since we have two ears, if we place a microphone near each of them, the sound recorded will feel incredibly immersive in a 360-degree sense.  

By putting headphones on the audience, we can give you the perspective of the performer herself, but at the same time, we can also put you in other worlds. 

It’s going to feel as if we as an audience are experiencing what she’s telling us in real time, so prepare to be petrified.