Poet #7

I forgive you
I’VE changed
I held a poet’s limb
for six months
I didn’t eat it

A woman sifts through the detritus of a stranger’s life so that she can deliver a respectful eulogy. As she does, her ex-lover travels across the continent on foot, grasping the dismembered hand of a philosopher, trying to make sense of his both his own psychosis and the madness of a war that is ravaging Australia. Above all, he is trying to reach the woman he loves. An Australian businessman sells his patented gene coding of indigenous plants to a multinational corporation while preparing to betray his wife.

Lastly, in an idyllic time many years before the mysterious catastrophe, a young librarian falls in love for the first time. It is she that will be betrayed by the businessman and it is in memory of her that a eulogy will be written. Her story is the lynchpin that unites the four different time-lines of the play. Her naiveté and her need are the central metaphors of this work and in her destruction lies the solution to the mystery of how this terrifying vision of the future has come to pass.

“Then it began to come together in a different way, and the voices in this richly detailed production began to resonate against each other and drive its splintered narrative. This generates moments of real theatrical power, a poetic suspension of everything except the present moment. And in these moments, the whole thing begins to flower as a wholly integrated work of theatre.” (Full Review)

Alison Croggon, Theatrenotes