{"id":36179,"date":"2017-04-20T09:57:53","date_gmt":"2017-04-19T23:57:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nofibs.com.au\/?p=36179"},"modified":"2019-04-13T23:49:41","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T13:49:41","slug":"no-country-for-older-women-burgewords-explores-foxtel-casting-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/no-country-for-older-women-burgewords-explores-foxtel-casting-mystery\/","title":{"rendered":"No country for older women: @burgewords explores @Foxtel casting mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0strategy\u00a0behind the casting of younger women will take\u00a0some explaining.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

IN February,\u00a0Foxtel and Fremantle Media Australia announced the casting<\/a><\/span> of an\u00a0eagerly anticipated television adaptation\u00a0of Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/em>, Joan Lindsay’s 1967 Australian\u00a0novel about a group of schoolgirls and their governess who go missing\u00a0at a local rock formation on Valentine’s Day,\u00a01900.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Natalie Dormer.<\/p><\/div>\n

This fictional story was\u00a0hauntingly filmed in 1975 by director Peter Weir, a production often credited with putting Australian movies back onto international\u00a0screens after a decades-long hiatus.<\/p>\n

I stumbled\u00a0on the casting announcement late and immediately sought\u00a0reactions in the media about\u00a0one quirk in the production that is currently filming: there are no older actresses in the series.<\/p>\n

But nobody seems to have commented that\u00a0the producers are taking considerable licence with Joan Lindsay’s characters.<\/p>\n

Cast as the widowed, expatriate English headmistress of the young ladies’ college that is central to the story, Natalie Dormer<\/a><\/span>\u00a0plays Mrs Appleyard, described by Lindsay as sporting a: “…high-piled greying pompadour”.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Rachel Roberts.<\/p><\/div>\n

The character\u00a0was portrayed by British actor\u00a0Rachel Roberts<\/a><\/span> in Weir’s film, suitably coiffed and in her\u00a0late forties at the time, whereas Dormer checks in at just 35.<\/p>\n

Slightly more surreal is the casting of Australian actor\u00a0Anna McGahan<\/a><\/span> as mathematics mistress Greta McGraw, since McGahan is just 28, playing a character penned as having “coarse greying hair”.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Anna McGahan (Photo: Eva Rinaldi)<\/p><\/div>\n

Hair colour and texture would not specifically denote middle age had Lindsay not stated the teacher’s years at the time of the fateful picnic at 45. English-born Australian actor Vivean Gray<\/a><\/span>\u00a0took on the role for Peter Weir in her 50th year.<\/p>\n

Australian actor Sibylla Budd<\/a><\/span> has been cast in\u00a0a role that was cut from\u00a0the 1975 production, that of Miss Valange, mistress of art and literature.<\/p>\n

At approximately forty years of age, Budd seems to be the matriarch of Appleyard College in Foxtel’s new vision of female hierarchy on Australia’s\u00a0Colonial frontier.<\/p>\n

Does age matter when it comes to schoolteachers in the final gasp\u00a0of the Victorian era?\u00a0Well, for this literary diehard<\/a><\/span>, it\u00a0certainly does, at least in the case of Miss McGraw.<\/p>\n

Joan Lindsay put barely a stroke wrong in constructing her mystery, and specifically identifying McGraw’s age,\u00a0leaving those of the other teachers as euphemistically middle-aged, or slightly older than the senior college students, was without doubt a deliberate plot point.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Viviean Gray as Miss McGraw.<\/p><\/div>\n

When editors took apart the original manuscript ahead of publication, lopping off the final chapter that explains the mystery, a crucial scene involving Miss McGraw was kept from readers. By identifying her age, and why she might have been more obsessed by the calculation\u00a0of time than the other mistresses, Lindsay placed\u00a0a clue that has rarely been noticed\u00a0in half\u00a0a\u00a0century of analysis.<\/p>\n

Even if the younger-than-written casting is designed to accommodate back-stories in the six 60-minute episodes, it is already working against the grain of the novel.<\/p>\n

According to Foxtel\u2019s head of drama Penny Win, the new adaptation: “…\u00a0will take viewers on a new and in-depth journey into this incredibly iconic Australian story”.<\/p>\n

Where the staff of Appleyard College are\u00a0concerned, it’s apparent that vision is considerably younger than Peter Weir’s, and Joan Lindsay’s.<\/p>\n

The original story also offers\u00a0the opportunity\u00a0for that rarest of beasts – the screenplay with multiple female roles, including a higher-than-usual number\u00a0of women over\u00a0the age of forty. For that reason alone the\u00a0strategy\u00a0behind the casting of younger women will take\u00a0some explaining.<\/p>\n

Imagining the impact\u00a0of Hanging Rock passing across impossibly\u00a0youthful\u00a0faces\u00a0–\u00a0instead of those whose\u00a0dignity has been achieved through the attainment of years\u00a0– already disappoints this viewer.<\/p>\n

The television series, due for release later in 2017, has not been without controversy. After an evocative protest<\/a><\/span>, an Australian female director was hired in December 2016 to address a perceived imbalance in the recruitment of local screen talent\u00a0of both genders.<\/p>\n

To date, there’s been no commentary on what might well turn out to be ageism in the casting.<\/p>\n

This article also appears on Michael’s blog<\/a>.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0strategy\u00a0behind the casting of younger women will take\u00a0some explaining. IN February,\u00a0Foxtel and Fremantle Media Australia announced the casting of an\u00a0eagerly anticipated television adaptation\u00a0of Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay’s 1967 Australian\u00a0novel about a group of schoolgirls and their governess who go missing\u00a0at a local rock formation on Valentine’s Day,\u00a01900. This fictional story was\u00a0hauntingly filmed in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":36183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,585,854,1510],"tags":[3229,3230,3234,3237,3238,224,3231,2802,3240,3241,3233,2803,2801,3232,3236,3239,3235],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/roberts.jpg?fit=800%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-9px","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}