During Sydney Festival 19, Sydney audiences will be able to share in the joyous homegrown work A GHOST IN MY SUITCASE from Barking Gecko, a sumptuous production about ghosts, grief and a secret family gift, adapted from Gabrielle Wang’s award-winning children’s novel. Twelve-year-old Celeste visits China to scatter her mother’s ashes, where she reunites with her gutsy grandma and is thrust into the thrilling world of ghost-hunting.
The Guide had the opportunity to ask some questions of Matt Edgerton, co-director of A GHOST IN MY SUITCASE.
SAG: The play’s staging captures the water city so beautifully, was the show always conceived with a video element?
MATT: I came across the novel in late 2015 and actually had no idea how we would adapt and stage it! The design, including the video elements have really evolved alongside the play script as we’ve explored the story with our creative team and visited locations in China. We had initially thought of having live water flooding the stage but moved away from this to what is actually a much more ‘fluid’ design – a series of constantly moving boxes that we project images onto which can take us anywhere we want to go in an instant.
Media Artist Sohan Ariel Hayes travelled back to China with my co-director Ching Ching Ho to film and photograph footage in Shanghai and the water town Wuzhen, which make up the majority of the images we use in the show. It has been an incredibly meticulous process of selecting images and mapping them onto moving surfaces so I’m glad it has paid off! Hopefully it lets an audience get swept up in this epic ghost-fighting adventure!
SAG: In your experience, is the mix of physical world building and visual representation particularly effective for tapping into children’s imagination?
MATT: Theatre for any age works best when it draws on an audience’s imagination. So there are times in this show when we are drawing on fragments of real-world footage to suggest a world that the audience can fill in. Many of the children in our test audiences said that they “felt like they were in China”.
In moments we even build very specific locations in ways that are quite visually spectacular. What we are always trying to do is to leave space for the audience’s imagination. A number of the ghosts remain unseen, but their presence is still felt onstage through sound, lighting and in the bodies of the actors.
One of my favourite scenes is a bus full of frogs conjured only with the actors bodies and voices. So it’s a balance of depicting some things and then leaving imaginative space for others, which is hopefully lots of fun for an audience.
SAG: Por Por is a wonderful character and very energetic and empathetic and Amanda Ma brings such strength and vulnerability to her. Plus her rapport with the audience is incredibly strong. Was casting such a role a long process?
MATT: The entire casting process was epic. It took about 18 months, through five rounds of national casting, to find the five finest performers for these highly demanding roles. We’re a Perth based theatre company so we ended up with three Perth actors and then Alice Keohavong from Sydney and Amanda Ma from Melbourne.
The show requires very physical performers, who on top of performing a dozen different characters, are constantly reassembling the stage and climbing on, in and through the set.
What has been wonderful with this cast is their close bond with one another, which you can see in their rapport as an ensemble and with the audience. They have also been extraordinary in their desire to finesse the work to make it better each performance!
SAG: As with Gabrielle Wang’s novel, the ghosts avoid outright malevolence but it’s still a bit of a scary topic for young people, is that part of the attraction? As it is with adults?
MATT: Yes the gauge of how scary to go with the ghosts is a very delicate one, and this is part of the reason we recommend audience members be aged 8+. No one has run screaming from the theatre yet, and the young people in our test audiences tell us that they absolutely love the feeling of being more than a little scared in places during the show.
For Sydney we’ve tweaked the voice for one of the ghosts to make it a shade more scary so there will be a bit more bite!
SAG: The production reaches across cultural boundaries doesn’t it? And generations of course, anyone can share in this narrative I think.
MATT: I love working on form and content that are new for me so this show has been a treat, using projection-mapped images to evoke an ancient Chinese water town! I have co-directed the work with Hong Kong born director Ching Ching Ho and the combination of our skills has been one of the real strengths of the project. We’ve had creative developments of the show in both Australia and China which has really deepened the layers in the show.
It may sound odd, but we conceived the show as very much an Australian story, even though it is set entirely in China! The main character Celeste has grown up in Australia and this is her first trip to her ancestral home. This return to ancestral roots is a very common experience for so many of us in this country, reconnecting with our heritage elsewhere. We wanted to tell the story in a way that our Australian audience would connect with, regardless of their cultural heritage.
A GHOST IN MY SUITCASE from Barking Gecko [Facebook] plays at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House 9-19th January.
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