For any artist immersed in the staging of a theatrical work, production week is usually the name we give others for panic. Yet in the last days before Newcastle Theatre Company stages the award-winning Michelanne Forster play, Daughters of Heaven, directors Lyn Singer and Leanne Mueller have their minds on other things.
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Their apparent distraction partly explains why true crime has become so addictive. The best of it is transportive and illuminating. We feast upon a dozen episodes in a single sitting from a single compulsion: to understand the life of the outsider. Or maybe we just crave to learn more about ourselves.
The story that began with two precocious Christchurch schoolgirls and resulted in a brutal murder in 1954 belongs to another category of true crime altogether. It belongs on its own shelf, marked for tales with no tip to call their ending.
If there is a reason why Singer and Mueller have their minds elsewhere on production week then it might be this - this play poses questions that they themselves cannot answer. They're immersed in a piece of true crime storytelling without being offered the satisfaction of a conclusion. The last episode hasn't streamed yet. It's still being written by the characters themselves.
As directors, Singer and Mueller might otherwise have arrived at a neat interpretation of character, of the minds and motives of those who live only briefly upon the stage. But real-life teenagers Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme are not those kinds of characters. Even in a genre founded upon outcasts, they seem misplaced and unlikely; two misunderstood and then reviled figures around whom intrigue continues to circulate.
Mueller believes that the revulsion felt towards the schoolgirls was comparable to what Australians once felt towards another infamously misunderstood figure. "Everybody had an opinion on these girls in the same way that they did about Lindy Chamberlain", she says.
Unsurprisingly, these feelings came to inform the many artistic representations of the two murderers. Newcastle University academic Dr James Bennett, the grandson of one of the medical witnesses in the trial (Dr FO Bennett), has published research papers on how these representations contributed to their demonisation. Whilst the Peter Jackson film Heavingly Creatures stopped short of depicting these chapters in their story, Michelanne Forster has focussed her lens more forensically. As well as animating the gossip that enveloped Parker and Hulme, both before and after their sentencing, Forster has depicted their trial verbatim.
"Forster was able to take all of the dialogue from the court scenes from the text of the newpaper reports," Singer says. "It was one of the last significant court cases that was transcribed by a daily newspaper. The dialogue between the girls comes from their actual diaries. For a playwright to put all that together, takes a lot of leg work."
