Phantasmagoria

What do you do when you find out your father tried to kill your mother?

a) Forgive him, move on and love him despite the fact?
b) Erase him completely from your memory? or
c) Employ a spirit medium and have a few words with him.
Briony chose option c) and this play is the result.

Phantasmagoria explores the complex relationship between a woman and her violent father long after he has passed away. Briony unearths her father’s childhood experiences in Sri Lanka, his brutal World War 2 history in Burma, migration, alcoholism, and his family’s eventual escape from him. Using a lens of magic realism, the work plunges beneath a seemingly everyday domestic space to reveal family secrets, hauntings and complex emotional landscapes. Travelling back and forth through time and space, dynamic and sensitive performance, comedy, puppetry and evocative animated imagery give physical life to the liminal realm of ghosts and the unseen.
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WRITTEN & CREATED BY
Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman
DIRECTED BY
Cathy Hunt
PERFORMERS / DEVISORS
Meg Dunn, Elnaz Shehsgelani, Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman and Yuchen Wang
DRAMATURGY BY
Emilie Collyer
ARTWORK, PUPPETRY DESIGN AND ANIMATION BY
Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman
SOUND DESIGN BY
Justin Gardam and Marlon Grunden
PHOTO BY
Jack Dixon-Gunn