WORLD PREMIERE

2020 REPROGRAM

What do you do when you find out your father tried to kill your mother?

a) Forgive him, move on and love him despite the fact?

b) Erase him completely from your memory? or

c) Employ a spirit medium and have a few words with him.

Briony chose option c) and this play is the result.

Based on a true story, Phantasmagoria is a play that explores the complex relationship between a woman and her violent father long after he has passed away. Briony unearths her father’s childhood experiences in Sri Lanka, his brutal World War 2 history in Burma, migration, alcoholism, and his families eventual escape from him. Using a lens of magic realism, the work plunges beneath a seemingly everyday domestic space to reveal family secrets, hauntings and complex emotional landscapes.

Travelling back and forth through time and space, Phantasmagoria is a sensorial feast flavoured with grief, love, loss, absurdity, surprise and a generous dose of magic. Dynamic and sensitive performance, comedy, puppetry and evocative animated imagery give physical life to the liminal realm of ghosts and the unseen.

"Beautiful storytelling... with puppets, projections and an original score that illustrates the continual contrast between fantasy and harsh reality."

THEATRE PRESS ON ‘THE DIVINATION AGENCY’

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Written By: Bernadette Trench-thiedeman

Directed By: Cathy Hunt

Performers / Devisors: Dan Goronszy, Joseph Lai, Myffy Hocking, Bernadette Trench-thiedeman

Dramaturg: Emilie Collyer

Lighting And Multimedia Design: Caitlin Overton

Artwork, Puppetry Design And Animation: Bernadette Trench-thiedeman

DURATION: 70 Min

WARNINGS + SUITABILITY: 15+

Adult Themes, Coarse Language