TV reimagining for classic Australian tale.

A re-imagining of Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic At Hanging Rock, in which three schoolgirls and their teacher disappear on a Valentine’s Day field trip, starts on SoHo this week. Natalie Dormer talks to James Rampton about her role as the mysterious English

During her five seasons playing Margaery Tyrell in Game Of Thrones, actress Natalie Dormer went to some pretty remarkable locations. But she may well have never filmed anywhere quite as extraordinary as Hanging Rock before. The actress went to the stunning – and stunningly remote – Australian location for the first time when shooting Picnic At Hanging Rock, which begins this week. In this deeply atmospheric reading of the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, previously adapted into a memorable movie in 1975, Dormer stars as Englishwoman Mrs Hester Appleyard. She has escaped a shadowy past in Britain and taken up a job as a headmistress at a girls’ college on the outskirts of Melbourne. But Hester’s apparently ordered existence spirals out of control when three girls and a teacher from her school vanish during a picnic at Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day, 1900. As the story unfolds, it emerges that there is more to these characters than meets the eye. Dormer, who has also headlined in The Hunger Games, The Tudors, Elementary, Captain America: The First Avenger, Silk and Casanova, underscores how the breath-taking Victorian landscape helped her get into character for Picnic At Hanging Rock. “It’s wonderful when life informs art,” Dormer says. “Hester Appleyard has come all the way from grimy Victorian London and is affected by the majesty of the wildness of the Australian outback. “This was my first trip to Australia, so to be standing in the Macedon region and to look out over the Hanging Rock made

an impression on me as well – no acting required.”

The 36-year-old British actress carries on, “You become so overwhelmed by the beauty and the scale of the Australian landscape, which is a character in itself. It has a power and informs a lot of the characters’ journeys.”

The actress goes on to fill in more details about Hester.

“She is a woman who has run from a dark past in London and has set up her own little fiefdom, this girls’ school, where she reigns as a sort of misguided anti-heroine, trying to teach girls what it takes to get on in the world. But in a kind of Miss Jean Brodie way, she is doing the opposite of what she thinks she is meant to be doing.”

Dormer says she was also drawn to the fact that this interpretation of Picnic At Hanging Rock shines a light on Hester’s shady background.

“In her novel, Joan Lindsay gives you hints there is a past life and that Hester isn’t being completely honest about her background.

“The delicious thing that has been done with our version of Picnic At Hanging Rock is that we have really fleshed out her morally ambiguous background in London. The audience slowly learns more and more, and that she is not as she portrays herself to be.”

Picnic At Hanging Rock has proved so compulsive over the years because it tells a universal tale.

The director Larysa Kondracki muses that, “It’s not necessarily a story that has to take place in the 1900s. We’re all still expected to behave a certain way and be told, ‘This is what a successful woman is’. That’s incredibly relatable for young girls today.

“So I absolutely think that this feminist show is a conversation about how hard it is to just be true to yourself and to form an identity for young teenage girls and for a lot of women in their older years, too.”

Lying at the heart of the appeal of Picnic At Hanging Rock is the riveting enigma of what has happened to these four missing people.

According to Beatrix Christian, who scripted the drama, “I think the fascinating thing is that, rather than a kidnapping, a murder or anything else, it’s about the disappearance.

“You could argue that the fact that something is unsolved gives it its power.

“The fact that there’s this utterly mysterious disappearance, all these different theories and all these fascinating people, in this strange place, at the same time – that’s the compelling part of this drama.”

Dormer concurs. “It’s such a great ensemble piece with so many characters with a lot of secrecy between them.

“It’s just wonderful the way this community and school have been fleshed out. But overarching this entire thing is: what happened to those girls?”

“The audience slowly learns more and more, and that she is not as she portrays herself to be.”

– Natalie Dormer on her character Hester Appleyard