Inside Carriageworks' Daring New Theatre Performance About Death

in partnership with

For Back to Back Theatre, a Geelong-based company renowned for pushing the envelope with their award-winning productions, a play about death is hardly outside the comfort zone. Lady Eats Apple is the company's newest production — and it's their most daring work to date. Taking the audience on an awe-inspiring, thought-provoking journey from the beginning of time to the present day, the performance is an otherworldly trip that engulfs you in a world of tragedy.

The concept for the play emerged when Simon Laherty, one of Back to Back Theatre's six ensemble members, suggested the company devise a tragedy for their next production. The rest of the team took to the idea immediately, says artistic director Bruce Gladwin. "Death is always a confronting topic but it's also something every single person eventually has to come to terms with, so we decided to run with the idea and see where we landed."

Lady Eats Apple premiered in Melbourne last year and will be performed at Carriageworks throughout March. From the set to the score, nothing about the play conforms to expectations. When the audience arrive at the theatre they are ushered into a massive inflatable black bubble, where everyone is given their own headset through which the play's dialogue and score are transmitted. "The idea was to create a visual and aural environment that would approximate the experience of death," Gladwin explains.

Within this otherworldly black bubble — which has contours and colours that change strikingly at the end of each act — the play unfolds. Divided into three loosely-connected parts, each act focuses on a death of some sort. The performance begins heavy in dialogue, then plunges the audience into an ethereal world where long wordless scenes are accompanied by a soaring score. Themes of genesis, near-death experiences and reflections on humanity appear, before the final act brings the audience starkly back to the real world and the present day.

Although Lady Eats Apple deals with a difficult subject, Gladwin assures it's done in a way that makes the production accessible to almost anyone. "If you're between the ages of 11 and dead, this is the play is for you," he says.

Gladwin, who received the Australia Council for the Arts Inaugural Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre in 2015, hopes that the structure, themes and the abstract and hallucinatory nature of the performance will leave the audience spinning. "Ultimately as a theatre director, you hope your audience has some sort of transformational moment, leaving the theatre slightly altered from who they were when they walked in," he says. "It seems very high stakes," he adds laughingly, "but that's ultimately the goal."

If you're yet to experience a Back to Back Theatre production, Lady Eats Apple will be a stellar introduction to how the company — whose ensemble features actors with perceived intellectual disabilities — continues to redefine contemporary theatre. "We've always made idiosyncratic art," Gladwin says. "It's what first attracted me to the company in the early 1990s and what keeps me inspired today."

Lady Eats Apple will be performed at Carriageworks from 16-18 March, 2017 — get your tickets here.