Marta Dusseldorp stars in new Tasmanian series Bay of Fires
Marta Dusseldorp plays a woman who is uprooted from her life with her two children and hidden in a mysterious place as two Russian killers hunt her down in Tasmanian series Bay of Fires.
‘The island’s landscapes had a troubling strangeness, if you looked beyond the stage sets we had erected,” Tasmanian novelist Christopher Koch wrote of his homeland. “And beyond Port Davey’s last little lights of settlement, in the extreme southwest all normality ended.”
This is the setting for the ABC’s new drama Bay of Fires, a small, dilapidated township called Mystery Bay, where signs warn of rabies and “Low Level Radiation”, and the hoarding welcoming visitors, if they were ever to unwittingly arrive, has the Mystery crossed out and replaced with the word Misery.
It’s a place, to paraphrase Koch, bearing “all marks of men”, a town though “which still doesn’t quite belong to them, nor they to it.” But as we soon find out strange, eerie things happen in Mystery Bay, violence lurking behind its dusty windows, crazy things fermenting in the surrounding isolation of primordial wilderness.
There’s a quality of never being able to take the landscape for granted behind this new series, a sense of disaffection that preoccupies so many of Tasmania’s modern writers. And led to TV series such as The Kettering Incident, The Gloaming, even the popular comedy Rosehaven, and movies like The Hunter or The Nightingale.
The show is from Marta Dusseldorp and her own label Archipelago Productions, the accomplished actor taking up a producing role behind the camera for the first time after hundreds of hours before it.
She is the co-creator with writers Andrew Knight (The Broken Shore, Rake) and Max Dann (Spotswood), and executive producer. The former star of prestige series such as Janet King and A Place to Call Home also plays the lead character in this serio/comic narrative, a middle class, highly accomplished woman who is uprooted from her corporate life with her two children and hidden in a mysterious place of troubling strangeness as two Russian killers hunt her down.
The plot reminds of one of the novels of the American Thomas Perry, the master of stories about how some people are forced by violence to decide who they really want to be and how they create new identities.
His constant theme is the psychology of identity, which he explores with supple puzzle plots, nuanced characters, and grave, elided prose.
But in Bay of Fires the attempt to “disappear” its characters has wonderful mordent comedic tones, its farcical sense of peril far removed from Perry’s austere bleakness.
This kind of biting humour is typical of Knight – think of Rake and its interplay of caustic wit and words – who has worked with Dusseldorp for more than a decade on various projects, from After the Deluge to the Jack Irish telemovies and television series.
In May 2020, Dusseldorp suggested a show based in Tasmania to Knight, she says in the production notes, and sent him an article about: “A destructive pre-dawn raid that had seen Tasmania Police send another message to the state’s Outlaw motorcycle gang that they are not welcome. At 4.30am on a Thursday a police armoured vehicle rammed its way through a heavily fortified property of the Outlaws.”
At the same time Dann, also a Tasmanian resident and a writer, like Knight of some comic sensibility, had been dabbling in a story of someone who winds up in Tasmania and things go horribly right or wrong, “depending on who you are talking to”.
Contacted by Knight, he agreed to become part of the project. Dann, like the award-winning Knight, is no stranger to genre, having written for TV for shows as eclectic as Full Frontal, SeaChange, Stingers, and most recently the movie Ektopos, described as “a claustrophobic independent science-fiction film about a failing lunar mining colony.”
With both Knight and Dann involved, Dusseldorp was on the way to realising a TV series with what she calls “a different edge, a riskier edge”, something that comes naturally to a writer like Knight especially.
“Andrew will make anything funny,” she says. “He just sprinkles this gold dust and he’ll take the most serious moment and flip it on its head and sumo-wrestle it to the ground and you just go, ‘How did you manage to make me laugh in this really dark moment?’ If anything, I just encouraged him to go as dark as he possibly could because I knew he would bring that beautiful lightness of touch and an ability to make us go from gasping to giggling. It’s a tightrope; we walked it as finely as we could.”
And she’s gathered a formidable group of actors to accompany her on this journey. Alongside Dusseldorp, is acclaimed New Zealand actress Kerry Fox (Conversations with Friends), Toby Leonard Moore (Billions), Yael Stone (Orange is the New Black), Matt Nable (Mr Inbetween) and the accomplished Pamela Rabe (Wentworth).
The set-up establishing director is Natalie Bailey, whose extensive and eclectic resume includes Armando Iannucci’s In The Thick Of It and the HBO series, Run, starring and executive- produced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. And The Sapphires’ Wayne Blair, proficient and versatile, is the other director.
Described as Ozark meets Fargo and Schitt’s Creek, the series picks up on Schitt’s Creek’s small town humour, Ozark’s family relocation, tapestry of characters and unexpected violence, and Fargo’s idiosyncratic blend of folksy comedy and pitiless menace.
The first episode, “Farmed Salmon”, directed by Bailey, begins in 1983 when a group of senior politicians with the Attorney-Generals’ Department are, for obviously nefarious reasons, “looking for a town no one’s ever heard of, boasts no features and no outsider wants to visit.”
We cut to the present and Dusseldorp is frantically travelling with two children somewhere in the outback muttering to herself how she hates the name “Stella”.
It’s explained somewhat when we flash back 44 hours. Dusseldorp’s Anika Van Cleef, successful CEO of ProperAus Finance, “bankers, insurance brokers, that’s my world”, suddenly and inexplicitly finds herself the target of two rather unkempt killers, only escaping with the assistance of a mysterious woman called Airlini (Rachel House). Mind you, there’s also a snake called Tobias involved, and a corrupt boyfriend who seems to be involved in her possible execution. On the run with her two kids, she’s given what is called a “legend” in intelligence terms, a cover in the form of a new name “Stella Heikkinen” - she scoffs, still bewildered, “It sounds like two beers”. Her phone destroyed, Stella is somehow rushed off to the west coast of Tasmania to Mystery Bay, so remote it has no GPS coverage, her kids still in school clothes and freezing.
They’re given the keys to a house, Stella is told she has bought, by a dodgy real estate agent, straight out of a Stephen King novel, played with lugubrious comic style by Stephen Curry. Slightly more attractive is Toby Leonard-Moore’s knock-about Jeremiah, proprietor of the town’s tow-trucking business, who has helped them into town after Stella runs into a wallaby on the road.
The locals, many carrying weapons, aren’t exactly welcoming of the new arrivals, unhelpful or hostile, or just downright confusing, like a couple of middle-aged women walking their pet pig, and there’s a sense of murderousness in the fetid air.
It’s all wonderfully preposterous and like Schitt’s Creek’s Rose family the newly impoverished Van Cleefs are going to have to face their newfound poverty head-on and come together as a unit to survive as they escape into oblivion.
And for all the comic shenanigans, Bailey’s assured direction occasionally catches sight of ragged ranges, lines of gloomy forests and what Christopher Koch called that “reminder of farness” that’s so characteristic of Tasmania.
The large cast delight is some outrageous characterisations, played with deadpan seriousness, and Dusseldorp is delightfully out of her element. “As part of the creative process we tried to not do what anyone expects,” says Knight. “Marta always gets cast as the upper-class serious woman but if you know her privately, she’s clumsy and funny as hell so it was fun to play with that dynamic.”
And it’s fascinating to see her stretch herself here. For years she has been required to pass through an astonishing variety of moods: sanity, fatigue, fear, exhaustion, triumph, solicitude and egotism but rarely humour. As a performer she exudes subtly and economy – she is a marvellous technician; she lights briefly on one emotion and then imperceptibly shifts to the next, her face hardening and dissolving to meet the requirements of the moment.
Here though she handles physical comedy, slapstick and snappy verbal humour and even when it doesn’t quite work, it’s a pleasure to witness the side of a great actor that has so far remained hidden.
Bay of Fires, Sunday, ABC, 9.30pm.