Last night I went with Elisabeth through the pouring rain to a reading of Alison Heather’s screenplay Mere Mortals at the Parnassus Den.
The Den is a basement room in the the Old Fitzroy Theatre in Woolloomooloo.
We entered through a small door of an old building into a perfect setting for Playing Beatie Bow (Ruth Park). Small rooms and stairways meandered in all directions.
Mere Mortals was played out in parallel time zones, reminiscent of Beatie Bow, but over many hundreds of years. Lovers separated by some magic are by chance or fate united. By circuitous routes they meet.
I listened and watched a film script played out in a small Den, imagining myself in a great house with many rooms and levels. Sparkling images presented themselves, from the various perspectives of characters, and camera/narrator. A man frozen in the ice on an Arctic sea, his moaning echoed in the moaning of the wind, bright toadstools beheaded in play, a human beheading. I was transported into other worlds and minds, and walked out into the Sydney streets afterwards as if entering into another scene of Mere Mortals.
What held my attention was that here were different times, and different personal perspectives, co-existing within the one audience.
I like the layering of time and space.