Knots
Old 505 Theatre Co, Newtown, NSW
She is training for the mission. They are decorating their living room. He is lost in the jungle. She is dismantling love. The long distance phone call is fuzzy. Jerry is in the Jungle and can’t get a signal. They are meeting for the first time at a party. Jerry is in space fixing the transmitter. She takes out the recycling and thinks about emptying. He lies on the wet ground with his nose bleeding. Jerry can feel himself crumbling… Is leaving a relationship the same as leaving the earth never to return?
A devised work based on the dramaturgy of orbits. Ideas, characters, plot lines and images circle like planets, always connected but never colliding. Space travel. Ecology. Civilisation. Love.
KNOTS
Devised by
Gareth Boylan
Giles Gartrell-Mills
Kerri Glasscock
Michael Pigott
Performers
Giles Gartrell-Mills
Kerri Glasscock
Michael Pigott
Set Design
Kerri Glasscock and Michael Pigott
Lighting and Sound Design
Michael Pigott
Stage Management
Maddie Osborne
Image: Claire Hawley
Jerry in Orbit
Jerry, weightless, pulls himself up level with the antenna. He reaches up an wrestles with the bolt. His gloved hands as clumsy as a drunks. Over the side of the ship a vast expanse of nothing but dark unfathomable. Behind him there is a light reflecting of the earth. He see refracted fragments of it in the shiny cladding but dares not turn around. Blue, green, oceans, landmass, atmosphere all reduced to fragments of colour. Jerry concentrates. In slow methodical movements he replaces the broken transmitter one bolt at a time it is not until the broken part is stowed in his leg pocket that he manoeuvres himself around and turns.
It is something impossible to describe. The earth from this distance. Like falling in love. Maybe this is what being born feels like? Jerry is a giant. A Greek god perched on a metallic arm of a machine hurtling though space.
For Jerry, the feeling of seeing the earth from this angle and distance is very specific a feeling that can only be described as…Tom Cruise. For Jerry in that instant, gazing down as the sun slips round the edge of the earth he has the impression that he is Tom Cruise. Not that he looks like Tom Cruise or feels like Tom Cruise might feel but that he is Tom Cruise and not just any Tom Cruise- not the couch jumping scientologist to old to take your shirt off in movies Tom Cruise but the beautiful flawed circa 1990 Days of Thunder Nicole Kidman Tom Cruise. His feathered hair stuffed into his helmet. He is grinning his Tom Cruise grin and his Tom Cruise heart is beating in his Tom Cruise chest and the earth is a tiny bubble below him getting smaller and smaller.
Jerry does a spaceman fist pump
It is exactly at this moment that Jerry notices that there is something horribly wrong. A small tear. Just half a millimetre somewhere. That some jagged part of the piece that must have snagged whilst tightening the bolt.
Suddenly he is not Days of Thunder Tom Cruise but Jerry and Jerry’s skin is starting swell. Jerry is growing lightheaded. Jerry’s saliva is starting to boil in his mouth. Jerry is losing consciousness.
and in that endless moment between the realisation and slipping away he keeps looking at the earth- a tiny marble on a giant piece of black velvet and over and over again he keeps thinking. This doesn’t make any sense.
None of this makes any sense to me at all.
Image: Claire Hawley
“Impressive, intense, provocative, Knots is a demanding yarn braided by focused and intelligent performances that sustain near on ninety minutes of twist right up to its enigmatic ending.”
Australian Stage Online, 9th Dec 2017
Image: Claire Hawley
“Most plays can be written down and re-staged, but Knots does not want to work that way. It is hard to imagine that the written word will satisfactorily capture its style and essence; its desire is to go boldly where no person has gone before.”
Suzy Goes See 7th Dec 2017