Our place: 7-ON’s We Are the Ghosts of the Future

We’re all familiar with digital content being present with us wherever we go, of being able to lose ourselves to the point of oblivion in a hand-held screen as real life happens around us, but the possibilities of immersive theatre are still relatively untapped in Australia. Sitting somewhere between art installation, theatre, and real-life do-it-yourself adventure storytelling, immersive theatre can be created on as large or as intimate a scale as the space and resources allow, with the intention that no two experiences are identical. British theatre company Punchdrunk are game-changing pioneers in this scene, and their work is nothing short of phenomenal, bringing “cinematic [levels] of detail” to large-scale installations in often unexpected locations.

Part of this year’s Village Bizarre festival in The Rocks, 7-ON’s We Are the Ghosts of the Future is a home-grown piece of immersive theatre set in The Rocks in 1935, on the day of Charles Kingsford-Smith’s disappearance. Whilst roaming around the Rocks Discovery Museum, the audience is given relative autonomy to wander in and out of rooms, building the (a?) world from the fragments and scenes we glimpse, the people we meet. Particularly memorable and powerful are the cross-dressing policeman, the abortionist (or ‘kind gentleman,’ to use the period’s euphemism), and the artist and the idiot savant (or ‘holy fool’). Street urchin children run throughout the building, trying to steal hats or delivering letters, and they are kind of like a ball of red string which connects each of the characters in this labyrinth.

Letters from the front: Ensemble’s The ANZAC Project

As the Western world bands together to commemorate the various centenaries of the First World War, there is any number of concerts, plays, books, films, television series and CDs to mark the occasion. To mark the centenary of the Gallipoli landing, the Ensemble theatre is staging The ANZAC Project, a double-bill of two new plays, which looks at the event and asks ‘what does it mean to us, now, here, today?’ Ensemble theatre is not alone in asking these questions, but perhaps we should all be taking a leaf out of these umpteen commemorations and asking ourselves ‘why is this military failure so celebrated?’

The ANZAC Project is comprised of two new plays – ‘Dear Mum and Dad’, by Geoffrey Atherden, in which a woman discovers a letter from her great-grandfather and learns of his experiences during World War I; and ‘Light Begins To Fade’, by Vanessa Bates, in which several stories intertwine, not least a group of television writers trying to find their way to tell the story of the Gallipoli landing, and the wider issues it opens up. While united in theme and idea, these plays work in very different ways and, ultimately, Bates’ is the more successful, the more theatrical.

NSFC*: Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s Every Second

This review was written for Concrete Playground.

The Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s Eternity Playhouse, formerly the Burton Street Tabernacle, is the home to Vanessa Bates’ Every Second, a new play about infertility, IVF, families and wanting children. 

Set on a raised spiralling platform designed by Andy McDonell, the staging circles around the various topics, elliptically and directly, confronting them from various angles and various positions, with tensions rising and falling, ultimately rising to a crescendo-like tipping point between partners and Bates’ two couples.