What do a gun, a bath, a telephone and an island have in common? Only Adelaide’s Brink Productions have the answer...
Time and space are not what they seem in the world of Land & Sea, a new collaborative work written by local award-winning playwright Nicki Bloom.
Directed by Chris Drummond with designs by Wendy Todd, music direction by Hilary Kleinig (Zephyr Quartet) and lighting by Geoff Cobham, and starring Danielle Catanzariti, Thomas Conroy, Jacqy Phillips and Rory Walker, Land & Sea is inspired by concepts of strange loops and optical illusions.
“Nicki Bloom’s writing is brilliant, sharp and economical,” said director Chris Drummond. "Strongly character driven and surreal, it is a rich and intoxicating combination of lyricism, brutality and absurdist anarchy. But underneath it all is a clear and compelling vision."
Intimate and immersive, the play is structured like a babushka doll. Land & Sea is set in the round and plays with notions of identity, time, memory, abandonment, regret and the resilience of love, taking the audience through an ever expanding universe of fading memories and searches for those loved and lost.
"Land & Sea is a meditation on the nature of existence – both in a Darwinian sense: the brutality and arbitrariness of survival, and in the sense that a single life is an ever-changing and transformative journey. It suggests that as we look back over the course of our lives we will wonder at the strange paths taken and the even stranger people we, ourselves, have become,’ said Drummond.
Land & Sea employs multiple performance languages including text, choreography, sprechgesang , song and installation design. It incorporates original and found music, drawing on classical piano music, baroque, opera and folk songs with bespoke arrangements and harmonies performed by actor/singers.
Catch this world-premiere work at The Queen’s Theatre from 12 – 26 May at 8pm, with special 4pm matinees on Saturdays (what an excellent rhyme). Tickets are on sale now through BASS and Try Booking .
Brink Productions creates original theatre through long-term collaboration that results in theatre of imagination where the memory outlives the experience. Previous productions include Skip Miller’s Hit Songs, Harbinger and When The Rain Stops Falling.
