ONE night in a secret urban garden in the north of the capital, the earth is about to erupt into explosive life.
The audience for this latest "site-sensitive" work by the Vision Mechanics company have already been promenaded down the quiet street beyond from a local hotel, and are sitting around the moodily-lit shrubbery while what sounds like the low rumble of cracking earth churns from the headphones each is given as they pass through the gate.
In the crepuscular glow, a lament is sung as smoke billows, until the singing morphs into an unseen woman calling her lost love. When the young woman finally enters, alive with possibility, it's as if she's risen from the ground itself, so at one with the birds and bees twittering and buzzing in our ears does she seem. For her, sex and love are primal, obsessive and unfettered, and only when her passions are thwarted and the life that drives her is ripped out of her do things spill over into anger.
There’s something mythic-sounding about Chris Lee’s richly poetic text, performed with abandon by Emma Anderson in Symon Macintyre’s production. The outdoor setting, given light and shade by designer Charlie Macintyre, and Tam Treanor’s seismic soundscape, breathes life into the piece’s dark eroticism.
It’s Anderson, however, who gives the 40-minute monologue its heart. As her character lashes out, the full self-destructive fury of a woman scorned is laid bare as she becomes a force of nature destined to haunt her garden of earthly delights forever.
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