Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca (1938) opens with one of the most iconic lines in literature (and, thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation, one of the most iconic lines in cinema): ‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.’ Manderley, we learn, is the stately home of Maxim de Winter. Situated on the rugged Cornwall coast that dominates so many of du Maurier’s novels, Manderley – a character in itself – embodies the exquisite tension between wildness and constraint, terror and beauty, that defines Rebecca.

Du Maurier’s opening line is the prelude to a stark and foreboding account of this dream version of Manderley.  The novel’s unnamed narrator, as she proceeds like a spirit through Manderley’s locked gates, remarks on how the Manderley of her dreams has changed from the Manderley where, once upon a time, she lived: ‘Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end.’

The description foreshadows the quintessentially Gothic heart of the novel (inherently a reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 Gothic masterpiece, Jane Eyre). Nature overwhelming human attempts to cultivate it, to keep it in check, signals darker forces – decay, guilt and ultimately death – that, similarly, cannot be held at bay. The description of this dream Manderley also prefigures the troubling coexistence of past and present, real and unreal, from which the narrator struggles to escape.

Anne-Louise Sarks’s stage adaptation of Rebecca takes as one of its key images this tension between untamed nature and our attempts to control it. As the audience settles, an enormous bunch of bright flowers, perfectly cut and arranged, stands centre stage. It is removed while the narrator (Nikki Shiels) recalls her dream of Manderley. We are then promptly moved to Monte Carlo where the narrator, a plain and gauche young woman, ‘works’ (or better, suffers) as companion to a loud-mouthed American, Mrs Van Hopper (Pamela Rabe, playing Mrs Hopper as something of a New World Lady Bracknell). While there, they meet the recently widowed Maxim de Winter (Stephen Phillips). Mrs Van Hopper is star-struck; however, a bout of influenza puts her out of action long enough for de Winter and the narrator to form an acquaintance. Just as a recovered Mrs Van Hopper is threatening to carry the narrator off on a voyage to New York, de Winter proposes marriage: our narrator can travel to New York with Mrs Van Hopper or return to Manderley as the second Mrs de Winter.

The Manderley of the narrator’s imagination – shaped by a postcard she bought as a child and Mrs Van Hopper’s heavily burnished accounts of the house’s reputation – is, in reality, a different beast. Overseen by the dour Mrs Danvers (also played by Pamela Rabe, sliding in and out of rooms like The Addams Family’s Lurch), Manderley is governed still by the routines and conventions established by Rebecca, the first Mrs de Winter. No matter that Rebecca drowned in a yachting accident more than a year before – there is no escaping her. The narrator can barely turn a corner without being told how beautiful Rebecca was, how adept she was at organising balls and soirées, how perfect her taste was.

The irony is that we know the name of the first Mrs de Winter but never the second. The narrator is, once she arrives at Manderley, subsumed by Rebecca’s absence, the ‘ghost’ of Rebecca more substantial than the narrator’s physical presence. Even Rebecca’s old room in the west wing is kept like a shrine, where Mrs Danvers (in a scene that stumbles uneasily between menacing and comical) encourages the narrator to admire, touch, and even try on some of Rebecca’s most beautiful clothing.

The scene pinpoints the differing – but strangely overlapping – obsessions that both the narrator and Mrs Danvers have with Rebecca. Once the scene moves past the awkward (and, I suspect, unintended) comedy, it is the one that comes closest to embracing something of the tension that courses through du Maurier’s novel. Crucially, Sarks seems to be offering here an answer to one of the central questions of Rebecca: Why does the narrator give herself over so entirely to Maxim de Winter, particularly as the secrets burdening de Winter are, one by one, revealed?

Pamela Rabe and Nikki Shiels (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Writhing on Rebecca’s bed, her mousy clothes replaced by one of Rebecca’s sleek gowns, her hair falling long and free, the narrator begins to embody the ghost of Rebecca, the ghost that has haunted her since the day she arrived at Manderley. In doing so, she frees herself of the constraints that society and her upbringing have placed upon her, and a feral sexuality is unleashed. When Maxim responds to her physically at last, it is uncertain whether it is the narrator or her incarnation of Rebecca that he is embracing (the scenes of the narrator’s emancipation from propriety are played out under a full-moon mirror while – perhaps a little too obviously – tangled vines creep up and over the bedroom, blanketing the bed and hanging from the ceilings).

The problem with this reading of the narrator’s collusion in Manderley’s haunting – her recasting as a quasi-Rebecca – is that it displaces Maxim from the narrator’s transformation. This is exacerbated by the production’s failure to manifest any sense of near-fatal attraction between the narrator and Maxim, a fault as much of the script as of the lack of magnetism between Shiels and Phillips. In Sarks’s production, Maxim has too little impact on the narrator’s story, an absence that robs the play of its critical anchor: the enigmatic relationship between them.

This is one of several levels on which the play fails to cohere. Sarks’s script is perhaps the weakest link. In attempting to encompass the sweep of the novel, she gives us all the narrative but none of the drama. What are, in the novel, pivotal moments of suspense – the narrator’s grand entrance on the night of the masked ball, the coronial inquest into Rebecca’s death, the fire that, according to du Maurier, splashed the horizon with blood – are galloped through and given as much weight as the breaking of an ornament or the ordering of dinner, leaving the entire production disappointingly flat and devoid of dramatic tension.

No sooner are we in a scene than we are out of it again, almost as though the whole play is an exercise in ticking off plot points. There is little opportunity for character development or for the actors to offer anything more than superficialities. None of this is helped by Rabe and Toby Truslove (who plays Rebecca’s raffish cousin, Jack) having roles that are little more than walk-ons and which add nothing to the drama (Rabe as Maxim’s sister, Beatrice; Truslove as Maxim’s faithful estate manager, Frank, and Maxim’s grandmother).

Shiels struggles to unify the disparate qualities the unsteady script demands of her character. She neatly captures the ungainly, lovesick, anxious, uncertain, frustrated, curious, and ultimately self-assured and sexual strands of the narrator; but it seems more a parade of personalities than the complex and interdependent layers of one individual. Shiels is further hampered by narration that works beautifully in du Maurier’s novel but that, in this context, is too ornate and sporadic.

Phillips, as Maxim, never seems certain why he is there, barely making it more than a step or two onto the stage before disappearing again. He is imperious and aloof, and shows flashes of temper, but there is little in his performance that explains his relationship with either of his wives. Only Rabe and Truslove truly galvanise the action, a factor not only of their range as actors but also du Maurier’s incisive characterisation of Mrs Van Hopper, Mrs Danvers, and Jack Favell.

The weaknesses in Sarks’s script are aggravated by set and lighting designs that largely misfire. Paul Jackson’s lighting takes too literally the idea of gothic dark and shadow. Even the scenes in Monte Carlo have little sense of warmth and light about them (in the novel, Monte Carlo is described as ‘far too brilliant, far too yellow’), meaning that when we are transported to Manderley with its steady unveiling of secrets, the lighting palette has nowhere to go. Sets (set and costume design by Marg Horwell) are largely impressionistic, a table and chairs here, a telephone there; swathed mannequins lurking upstage; the previously mentioned bed and its creeping jungle.

The minimalist sets – coming and going as swiftly as the scenes – might signal something of the dream-Manderley but are too ephemeral to give us a sense of the weight of the house and its history. Large black flats give an impression of things hidden and unknown, but their constant opening and closing as we hurry from one short scene to the next tend to stall the play’s momentum. So too the lighting blackouts which dominate the second half of the play, the stuttering periods of dark often lasting longer than the scenes that precede and follow them.

Those who have no inkling of du Maurier’s plot may gasp as the truth of what happened to Rebecca is revealed. However, those who have even a passing acquaintance with the novel (or with Hitchcock’s film) are likely to be disappointed with a production of Rebecca that, while occasionally striking, renders du Maurier’s classic novel as something closer to sensational melodrama than dark Gothic thriller.

Rebecca (Melbourne Theatre Company) continues at the Southbank Theatre until 5 November 2025. Performance attended: October 4.