This Trick ~ The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice
Director Kat Henry brings her production company Stella Electrika to Melbourne after success in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and Berlin, with the production This Trick (The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice).
This Trick tells the torrid story of the obsessive love of a young married couple who live on the 7th floor of their apartment block; 7 floors being the height at which you are guaranteed death if you fall. They totter perilously on this edge of passion and suffocation in a co-dependent relationship that in turn repels and consumes them. Abstracted from the classic Greek Myth this is a contemporized version that asks what a relationship looks like when the couple involved are so devoted to one another that not even death can separate them.
This Trick started its life in a dramaturgical process with Brisbane’s Playlab and was soon after short-listed for the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award. It had a development at Albury/Wodonga’s Hothouse Theatre and then at Metro Arts in Brisbane. Now it has its first public season at Melbourne’s La Mama Courthouse. Melbourne actors Penny Harpham and Matt Hickey enact the roles of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Designer, NIDA graduate Hanna Sandgren, attaches to the production along with Producer James Lees.
This Trick was shortlisted for the 2010 Queensland Premier’s Drama Award and has been developed through Playlab, HotHouse and Metro Arts.
This performance depicting the struggle of co- dependency in love was absolutely superb . The young actors did an unbelievably fine invocation of the dysfunctional energy that can be life threatening between two people. At moments the atmospheric vapour , rose like a kaleidoscopic swirl to the black ceiling of the theatre, casting ghostly images back to me of those moments in my own life when the seperation between myself and another became blurred!!!
In the battle against the womb like walls of their co- dependency the two actors on the stage skillfully constructed a raw , very private, labrynth of tangible pressure on the stage. It was an outstanding , enriching , reassuring and very worthwhile experience!! Thank you!