Could a story published in 1957 have predicted the end of the world?

By Louise Rugendyke

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What would you do if you knew the end of the world was coming? Would you plant a garden? Plan for a future you knew could never be? Or would you throw caution to the wind and rush headlong into the unknown? Embrace today and damn tomorrow?

It’s a question Tommy Murphy spent a lot of time thinking about, as he adapted Nevil Shute’s classic novel On the Beach for Sydney Theatre Company.

“I’d like to think that, similar to what Shute asked us to believe, is that it would be a time of expressing love, finding intimacy,” Murphy says. “It wouldn’t be the zombie apocalypse that we’re mostly asked to believe.”

Ben O’Toole and Michelle Lim Davidson star in Sydney Theatre Company’s adaptation of Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic classic On the Beach. Credit: Steven Siewert

Published in 1957, Shute’s story about the world ending after a nuclear war was hailed as “haunting” and “shocking”. It was a bestseller for years after its release and was quickly adapted into a star-studded film in 1959, with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astaire, who played an Australian scientist with a distinctly plummy accent (he wasn’t the only one – it turns out nuclear armageddon has the ability to wipe out humanity and Australian accents).

While the film received mixed reviews, it was also said to have confused its audience, who were looking for a romantic and sunny jaunt as promised by the title, which is actually is a naval term meaning “retired from service”.

Instead, what Shute delivers in the book is a world that has succumbed to radiation poisoning in the aftermath of World War III – Albania started it, NATO joined in and China and Russia finished it. The only remaining outpost is Melbourne, at the bottom of the world where, two years after the attacks, life goes on – a mix of hope, hedonism and hopelessness – as people wait for death to descend.

It sounds bleak – and it is (not for nothing did Ava Gardner apparently say of the movie, which was filmed in Melbourne, “On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it”) – but what Murphy also sees is hope.

“The film definitely, politically, was the first fiction to really open the public’s eyes to that danger [of nuclear war] and make it a personal terror,” Murphy says. “And the play, obviously, is a very different undertaking to that. Certainly, the message is the same – Shute is still saying to us, ‘It’s not too late. It’s not too late for humanity.’ That’s a very optimistic thing to be saying and that’s also the tricky bit – that actually this is a weirdly very hopeful thing to be putting out to the world.”

Ava Gardner on location at Gellibrand Pier, Williamstown, during filming of On the Beach in 1959.Credit: Staff photographer

Murphy, who wrote the critically acclaimed play and its film adaptation Holding the Man, as well as Belvoir’s box office hit Packer and Sons and the recent ABC drama Significant Others, picked up On the Beach a few years ago, while he was searching for a story to adapt for the stage. Then, “Sydney was on fire”, he says, a city enveloped by smoke. Then, as he began to adapt the book, a different, life-threatening emergency occurred: COVID-19.

“The great fortune of the timing of this production is how connected it seems to be to the moment and these uncanny prophecies of Nevil Shute that I didn’t see, I couldn’t see when I started, when I first picked up the book before the pandemic,” Murphy says. “And now, in all sorts of ways, [these prophecies] feel absolutely, astonishingly soothsaying. I couldn’t see it coming, but somehow Nevil Shute could from 1957.”

(And it’s true, Shute was incredibly prescient – there’s a great exchange where a scientist is bemoaning the fact that no one listens to scientists.)

What Murphy took from Shute’s soothsaying was the idea of resilience, of people finding their way through dark times by turning to community and friendship as a way of finding hope.

Central to that are the group of friends at the centre of the story – a young Australian naval liaison officer, Peter Holmes, and his wife, Mary; and US Navy Commander Dwight Towers, whose submarine has taken refuge in Melbourne, and Moira Davidson, a Melbourne socialite who Towers begins an affair with.

While Towers and Davidson are the glamour couple (Peck and Gardner in the film), the story’s beating heart belongs to Peter and Mary, who have a young daughter whose fate rests in their hands.

“They’re starting their family life as the world is ending,” says Ben O’Toole, who plays Peter. “And as it looms ever closer, there are certain questions these two have to ask themselves that other characters don’t necessarily have to.

Tommy Murphy (left) and director Kip Williams during rehearsal for On the Beach at Sydney Theatre Company.Credit: Daniel Boud

“And Peter, in particular, refuses to roll over and accept [the world is ending]. As long as there’s breath in our lungs, there’s a chance there’s something worth fighting for.

“A character says to him, ‘We have about six months, that’s it’. And Peter’s reaction to that is we have six months to find a way out of this, whereas everybody else is trying to make the most of the six months. And it’s not just for himself and for humanity, it’s what life can they offer their child. It’s an awful thing.”

For Michelle Lim Davidson, who plays Mary, the cruelty is that Peter and Mary are the only characters who have to make a decision for someone else.

“Everyone is making decisions for themselves – how they would like to be at the end of their existence – but for [Peter and Mary], they are taking responsibility for another person, a young child, who is innocent and has done nothing to contribute to the problem the world is facing.”

In the adaptation from book to stage, it’s Mary who has undergone the biggest transformation. In Shute’s novel she, and a lot of the women, are almost dismissed, accused of living in a fantasy world, says Murphy, who decided that Mary should instead wisely guide Peter, who is struggling to accept the facts.

Ben O’Toole (left) with Matthew Backer (right) and Alan Zhu during rehearsals for On the Beach. Credit: Daniel Boud

Says Lim Davidson: “Mary is practical, rational. And unlike Peter, she has the ability to zoom out to see the macro. She’s hopeful, but not in the same way as Peter, she’s looking more broadly. The fact that she’s planting a garden, it feels like a very selfless act, to plant something beautiful that she will never see.”

But it’s not just the pandemic; Shute also envisaged US nuclear submarines in Australian waters. AUKUS, anyone?

“There’s the thing Moira, the character, complains about in the story is that it’s just unfair,” Murphy says. “The war that [Shute] imagined, Australia didn’t do anything to trigger it and there they are, copping it.

“And that’s the other thing, the war Shute envisaged – one of the factors that they speculate that causes that war, is aggression between Russia and NATO over Ukrainian territory. It’s just uncanny that it speaks to the present.”

For director Kip Williams, the task of shepherding this sweeping story onto the stage is momentous. It’s a saga that takes in not only Melbourne, but the east coast of Australia and America as the US submarine heads home, trying to find the source of a faint radio signal coming from Seattle.

“My set designer Michael Hankin said to me, when we sat down, ‘So you’re thinking screens?’ and I said, ‘No, not at all,’” says Williams, whose cine-theatre approach gets its West End debut early next year with The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Instead, Williams has gone back to basics. “Human beings sit at the centre of it. And there’s a reality that emanates from them. And then there’s a theatre-making that invites the audience’s imagination to create these images on stage because, obviously, we can’t put a full submarine on stage.”

Like Murphy, Williams was struck by the timelessness and humanity of Shute’s story.

“It’s about how to choose to live in the face of adversity,” Williams says. “The premise of this piece is the extreme adversity that the characters are facing, but that is a kind of metaphor for the type of grief and loss that all humans encounter throughout their life.

“And what exists within the story is an invitation to live in the present, and to value and cherish what you have in the present, whilst also starting to think about your life beyond the limits of your own existence. And thinking about yourself being part of a continuum that’s going to exist for a long time after we’ve all shuffled off this earth.”

Williams is also quick to reassure that it is a life-affirming story – although anyone who has seen any of Murphy’s work knows they are in for a bucketload of tears. Even O’Toole admitted to getting choked up in rehearsal.

“It’s really about the navigation of how love exists between people,” Williams says. “And Tommy writes that dialogue with such beauty and with such heart and poetry. It’s a stunning piece.”

Has Williams thought about how he would spend his last days on Earth?

“I think I’m a combination of the characters in the play,” he says, chuckling. “I identify a lot with Mary, Michelle’s character, and the kind of logic Mary carries and the pragmatism and rational approach she has. But at the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, I also think I’m a bit like Peter, because Mary looks at the 99 per cent and says that’s the outcome and Peter looks at the 1 per cent and says, ‘But there’s still hope’. And running a theatre company during the pandemic, whenever there was the 1 per cent hope …”

O’Toole, however, has a different take on his final days.

“I would do a play about it called On the Beach,” deadpans O’Toole. “And I’d be buying my tickets now for fear there wouldn’t be any future.”

On the Beach is at Roslyn Packer Theatre from July 18 to August 12.

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