SANCTUARY - LEITH FESTIVAL

SANCTUARYLEITH FESTIVAL

 "...like Black Dingo’s Sanctuary at the Whitespace Gallery, a downbeat but painfully observant show about a young couple driven apart after an abortion, featuring two moving performances from Rob David and Cara Wicks" - Joyce McMillan

A play produced by Black Dingo Productions, written by David McFarlane, starring Cara Wicks and Rob David and directed and designed by me.

The play is about a young couple driven apart after the decision to move in together and have an abortion.

One of the key things I picked up on in the script was Michael's constant tidying up after Janet. I designed the set so that his home could easily be pulled around and pulled apart - made messy and made tidy again.

The boxes have furniture drawn onto them and so if one piece of the pile is removed the piece of furniture becomes unidentifiable. As the play moves on these boxes get knocked down and put back together but never in the same way they were to begin with. As well as this the netting above the set falls and is left in a heap amongst the debris of boxes and props. 

The characters then discuss such things as clothes they've bought, work, gestures of love lifted from Hollywood films and sex tips learnt from women's mags, foregrounding the two dimensional banality of their existence. That is until a moment of profound reality interupts and the set comes crashing down. The boxes are then re-assembled in the most as hoc manner in an attempt to salvage some previous normality out of the detritus - TV Bomb

They were painted white to try and help detract from the fact that they were cardboard boxes and so in tying with this all the props were painted white also. The idea being that everything in the flat that belonged to Michael was white and everything Janet brought in from outside was colourful. This added to the idea of Michaels home as sacred and something Janet could visually invade upon.

My initial visual desire was to create a child like tent for them to use as a bed. This could create a sanctuary that belonged to Michael and one that Janet could help build and then destroy. 

Sanctuary played at The White Space Gallery on the 13th, 14th and 15th June at the Leith Festival with positive reviews. It will be back, new and improved for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on the 12th, 13th, 14th and 16th of August at 6pm at venue no 127 St Johns Church on Princes Street.