Ruby Moon

It begins like a fairytale...

In Flaming Tree Grove, life appears to be picture-perfect. Security and privacy are coveted and seclusion is its own reward, until the day when little Ruby Moon sets off to visit her grandmother at the end of the cul-de-sac and is never seen again.

The neighbourhood fractures into grief and suspicion in the search for answers to a terrible deprivation and potential crime. Ray and Sylvie Moon struggle to come to terms with the disappearance of their six-year-old daughter, and hoping to trigger someone’s memory of having seen Ruby they keep a child mannequin who is dressed in the same clothes Ruby was last seen in.

The case has long gone cold, and they are almost ready to give up hope when a parcel containing the arm of Ruby’s doll arrives on their doorstep. Desperate for answers, they go up and down the street to re-interview their eccentric neighbours, any of whom could be responsible, including a bible thumping elderly woman, an ex-soldier who still lives with his mother, Ruby’s creepy babysitter and even a mad scientist. The strangest of all is “The Wizard” – a former runaway who returned home to find his parents had moved away. He is never seen, but will often knock on the Moons' door.

Haunted by their missing child, Ray and Sylvie descend further into a nightmarish world where the boundaries between the real and imaginary become increasingly blurred.

Where is Ruby and who knows what happened to her? Did she ever exist?

Written by Matt Cameron in 2003, Ruby Moon is a contemporary play that explores the grim mythology of the missing child in Australian folklore, about the prevailing fear of our times and looks at the nature of that unease that lurks in the world that we live in. It combines elements of absurdism, gothic horror, black comedy, and fairy tales with the paranoia of post-9/11 suburbia as well as drawing inspiration from real-life headlines about missing children.

DIRECTOR
Susan O'Toole-Cridland

CAST
Ray Moon - Gary Farmer-Trickett
Silvie Moon - Sandra Harman