Attic Erratic: Domino

Young independent company Attic Erratic started performing and working together in 2010 and are well on their way to being on of those companies who you have to see what they do next.

I missed quite a bit of their early stuff, but not anymore. If you don’t know them, start with DOMINO.

Firstly, it’s on at the gorgeous Abbotsford Convent in the slightly creepy Industrial School (follow the signs near Lentil as Anything – and arrive early to eat at Lentil as Anything) and they sell warm and spicy mulled wine with currents. Winner already.

In a post-apocalyptic dystopian future of forever night, five young men are alone, angry, bored and desperate. Light and hope are things of dreams, but they play a game about the end of the world, not knowing if there’s a line between reality and myth.

With a bar and a huge space to use (the same space where a rat up-staged everyone at the 2012 Last Tuesday Society’s Xmas special), the design team (Laura Harris: set and light, Lucy Welsh: projection, Zoe Rouse and Mia Zielinski: costume, Tom Pitts: sound and music) have created a space that begs to be entered, while creating a sense of nervous fear with dark corners and unseen rooms where wolves can hide.

Director Danny Delahunty lets the creative and beautiful language of Melbourne writer Giuliano Ferla’s script lead the story and define a world that’s so far from ours that the rhythm and meaning of English has evolved.  It’s like a memory of language; it makes sense, but isn’t quite right. And it’s a world without women. A world without easy comfort and the eternal life of procreation has to be found elsewhere.

Actors Alex Duncan, Joseph Green, Kane Felsinger, Matt Hickey and Spencer Scholz relish the work and let us see beyond their facade of bravado and toughness. Nerves could be seen on the preview I saw, but they have nothing to be nervous about.

This is a powerful work that questions masculinity and the future of all of us in a time when playing the “gender card” brings calls of unfair.