It’s time to meet the mystery woman behind Hitchcock’s greatest hits

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” It’s often cited as one of literature’s greatest openings: in just a few words Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca conjures its narrator’s voice, its haunting setting and the tone that will carry the rest of the mysterious novel.

In the 1950s du Maurier was Britain’s highest earning female author. This year Malthouse Theatre will mount an adaptation of her story The Birds, while Melbourne Theatre Company will take on Rebecca. If you know du Maurier’s name but not much more, it’s a fine time to get better acquainted.

Melbourne film writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas lists du Maurier among her favourite authors. “I’m actually surprised that more of her work hasn’t been adapted. Her short stories are made for film. There’s something really slippery about them that I find so beautiful, but also quite discomforting.”

Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Credit: Getty Images

Like many, Heller-Nicholas came to du Maurier through Alfred Hitchcock. The master of suspense adapted three of du Maurier’s tales – The Birds, Rebecca and the novel Jamaica Inn – but the long shadow he cast means that today most people associate those titles with the director, not the writer.

For all their strengths, Hitchcock’s films don’t capture the extraordinary intimacy of du Maurier’s prose. Heller-Nicholas calls Rebecca one of the great Gothic stories, comparing it to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. “It’s a story about how reality can’t keep up with a fantasy. It’s powerful and it’s dark and it’s beautiful and it’s intimate. Rebecca reads like somebody’s whispering into your ear.”

MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks was living in London when she first happened upon a copy of Rebecca. She was bewitched. “She draws you into the inner world of the characters, their fears and their fantasies, and then suddenly things get very complicated and the drama escalates. It is thrilling. This is a romance that becomes a mystery and it is thick with suspense.”

The other reason Rebecca stayed with Sarks is that “it was so ahead of its time. It’s bold and her writing captures a wit and humour that still feels very fresh. Daphne du Maurier was speaking in a very sophisticated, coded way to women at the time and all these years later she still speaks to me.”

From left, Pamela Rabe, Nikki Shiels and Bert LaBonte star in Rebecca at the MTC.Credit: Jo Duck

Sarks says that du Maurier’s ability to create landscapes through language is a gift to anyone trying to adapt her work. “(Her) writing is incredibly evocative. It’s poetic and muscular. She crafts vivid descriptions of the trees, the flowers, the rhododendrons and azaleas, and of the woods surrounding Manderley. The natural world is another character in the book and in our production too.”

Then there’s the haunting (and perhaps haunted) setting of Manderley. The gothic manor was modelled on Menabilly, a gorgeous country home in Cornwall that du Maurier discovered as a teenager and later restored. In private letters she often spoke of her love for the estate she called home for more than 20 years, and in a later essay on Rebecca she described it in terms as lavish and vivid as any of her fictions: “At midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in strange and eerie fashion we are at one, the house and I.”

“We are at one”: Daphne du Maurier at Menabilly in 1944 with her children, Christian, Tessa and Flavia.Credit: Getty Images

Du Maurier’s life off the page was as interesting as anything she invented. Born into a sprawling dynasty of actors, authors and artists, she led a tomboyish childhood that translated itself into what she called the “male energy” that fuelled her writing. She was rankled when people cast her as a romance novelist, but as the decades have passed her reputation as a serious literary talent has grown.

She was a contradictory figure, described by some as reclusive and by others as a warm and witty host. She could be proud, but her own family only discovered she’d been made a Dame when they read it in the newspaper.

Du Maurier’s elusive character is mirrored in her writing; even when grounded in reality, something unsettling hovers beneath the surface. Du Maurier’s delicate use of the paranormal brings to mind Shirley Jackson, another mid-century author whose work frequently produced a sense of the eerie.

“The parallels with Shirley Jackson are really interesting,” says Heller-Nicholas. “Whether we want to call them capital-F feminist writers or not is obviously open to debate, but certainly these are two writers who at their best were interested in the gendered experience. They really understood how the fantastic is a language to explore that.”

The Birds is one of du Maurier’s most effective short stories. Unlike Hitchcock’s sunny version, the original takes place in grey Cornwall, where a farmer and his family find themselves under inexplicable avian attack. As it becomes clear that this violence is both coordinated and occurring across the country, the beleaguered victims find their chances of rescue dwindling while their questions only grow.

Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Malthouse artistic director Matt Lutton hit upon du Maurier’s short story while pondering the possibility of “adrenaline and terror in the theatre. How can we create something that will really have a big bodily impact on audiences?” He recalled that Hitchcock’s adaptation had terrified him, but when he came to the original tale he found so much more to play with.

He took the idea to writer Louise Fox. She called it a no-brainer: “Du Maurier’s a deeply adaptable writer, for theatre, for film, for other mediums ... Her metaphors stay open, and her use of genre and the paranormal and the mysterious is very evocative. It’s weird because she was always considered a romance writer. But actually, she’s a writer about anxiety and paranoia and fear and overthinking. She’s probably got more in common with Kafka than she has with a romance novelist.”

Daphne du Maurier in 1929.Credit: ullstein bild via Getty Images

Critic Mark Fisher has attributed the eeriness of du Maurier’s tales to the way they reveal how our attempts at making sense of the world are laughably fragile. Birds shouldn’t attack en masse. Rebecca should stay dead, or at least have the decency to out herself as a ghost.

Fox agrees that the sense of fighting something you can’t even explain is something people of all eras can understand: “The desperate attempt to try and make sense of something that is incomprehensible or unexplainable or hard to define.”

Lutton and Fox’s adaptation will be performed by one woman (Paula Arundell) complemented by a rich soundscape piped through headphones straight to audience members’ ears.

The director says his aim is “to tap into that very primal animal instinct of what it means to feel attacked. We all know what it is to be swooped by birds. You naturally protect your eyes, your ears, and I think that’s about feeling, in a metaphorical way, like something much larger than you, that you definitely can’t control, is assaulting you.”

He jokes that audience members fleeing their seats would be a sign of success, but also notes that “there are no birds in the theatre. It’s sound and it’s light and it’s a performer. It’s the power of a ghost story or a campfire story. When you tell a campfire story, you start to see the story in the shadows around the fire.” As long as we keep telling stories, hopefully, du Maurier’s shadows will keep offering up their secrets.

The Birds is at Malthouse Theatre from May 16. Rebecca is at Southbank Theatre from September 30.