Lady Eats Apple — Back to Back Theatre

Overview

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.

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. He hopes that the structure, themes and the abstract and hallucinatory nature of the performance will leave the audience spinning.