Abstract Theatre

Last night we went to a play called The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

For weeks I've been calling it Conversations on a Train, because I'd forgotten the real name, but I knew that all the dialogue in the play had come from conversations overheard on Melbourne trains. The writers had been travelling the Melbourne lines for a year and collecting bizarre snippets of conversation.

I had thought that they would be intertwined into a story. Instead what we saw was more installation art. Four actors talking, sometimes to each other, but most often to themselves and sometimes over the top of each other. They'd recite random things that the weirdest and probably most drug affected bogans in Melbourne had said while catching a train.

Whilst they were reciting the lines, they were also interacting with the set, which was essentially rows of chairs similar to a train layout with bits and pieces strewn about. So they might stand on a chair and do some yoga poses, or pick up some rubbish, or screw up a newspaper and proceed to shove it down their dress, etc... One of the actors put on a pair of bathers under her clothes, then took off her clothes and stuffed them into the bathers - including her stiletto heels. Another actor was wearing a balaclava with plastic cups stuck to it in a sort of a mohawk style and at one stage he took a cup off his balaclava and offered it to another actor.

It was bizarre.

Some of the lines were classic and I'm sure I've heard many similar conversations on my train line. Especially all the relationship ones.

It was just a very surreal interpretation of the lines. A world where surrealism, Melbourne and psychodelic drugs intertwine.

I'm not sure I'm quite arty enough to appreciate that sort of theatre.