Deceased Estate
Melbourne Fringe Festival
244 Blyth Street, Brunswick East
27th September 2008
As a video artist for theatre, occasionally I am asked to film shows of friends or colleagues. I do enjoy this, trying to capture the live act in some ways it is almost like performing the live act itself. I am acutely aware when filming that I am not part of the experience, and therefore I make myself as inconspicuous as possible, make myself as if I was part of the audience.
So when I arrived at the house that was the venue for the show Deceased Estate, I was aware of two large cameras and a boom microphone on a long pole. As the audience was split into two by a Real Estate agent played by Penelope Bartlau, the film crew came with the group I was in. As our group encountered our first character from the house, a grandmother who was inviting us to plant rosemary in the garden – a very intimate and precious moment, this was broken by two camerapeople scurrying around the outside of the group and a boom mic thrust between two members of the audience to record the audio of the grandmother. In the final scene which was set in the 1940′s, here was a young couple dressed in period costume, hair and makeup WITH A RADIO MIC AND BATTERY PACK ON.
Hmmm, anyway trying to see past this and immerse myself in what was supposed to be an intimate audience/performer relationship – here is what I saw;
The production elements were great – puppetry, hidden lighting and nice sound. The performers were excellent all round. The characters didn’t hang together that well as a throughline of a story. I guess the show was not supposed to be this – it was about stories emerging and dropping away as memories do, but somehow I wanted more from the interactions, more meat on the bone. This was also how I felt after Mysteries of the Convent, which had a similar structure and lacked some serious weight to it.
I didn’t hate this show – quite the opposite. In fact I was so disappointed that my experience had been warped by the documentation of it because I truly believe that this show could have been one of the best shows I have seen so far at Fringe. Damn it!
