Modern Bible

“We started out as a forum to perform the kind of work we were interested in seeing,” says Danny Delahunty, Artistic Director of Attic Erratic. Working with a core team of collaborators, the company have produced ten plays since their founding in 2010. At this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival they will launch a new work, The City They Burned, the third to be directed by Delahunty. This site-specific work is a modern retelling of the biblical tale of Lot and the fall of Sodom. From the moment he heard that Fleur Kilpatrick, a regular contributor to Attic Erratic, wanted to write this piece, Delahunty was eager to be involved. “It’s a story about genocide, rape, and the unnecessary application of power on a group of people. From the very start, the entire city is judged for something that none of the individual people have control over which is their way of life, how they live.” Kilpatrick and Delahunty drew parallels with modern Australia. “[That judgement] has enormous resonance for me – how we treat other countries and other cultures. We have that sense of ‘other’ where ‘other’ is worse, rather than just being something we don’t understand.”

Today’s Sodom is an industrial city, a huge metropolis of operation similar to China’s Shenzhen, all controlled by just one company. “That company in the original text is God,” explains Delahunty, “an external power that doesn’t give direction to the people it has control over, it just tells them how they should be acting and how they should be living their lives.” The company sends two inspectors to the town (in the original text God sends two angels) to decide whether it’s worthwhile continuing operations there or to simply destroy it and kill its inhabitants. Naturally, the townspeople turn on the inspectors and the violent threats they hurl at them are diffused only when Lot suggests giving up his daughters as a peace offering. Disgusted by this act the inspectors exile Lot and his family from the town. This sets up the thrust of the piece, following Lot’s family in exile and exploring the effect of this judgement on individuals, rather than society as a whole.

Both Delahunty and Kilpatrick were interested in involving the audience in a non-traditional way, and they found the perfect site to fulfil this wish. The Cavern Table Performance Space in Collingwood was “just a couple of rooms before we got there. Now it’s a performance space, and when we leave it will go back to just being a couple of rooms”, says Delahunty. The audience will enter the main room for the first act and immediately become a part of the world, playing the citizens who Lot has gathered together in order to give a face to the town that the ruling company is so willing to heartlessly destroy. When Lot is exiled, the audience will move with him and his family to another part of the building. “As a director, the best thing you can do is to make a piece of theatre that you would want to see yourself.” As for this latest work, Delahunty says that for him it’s shaping up to be “the perfect piece”.

3 — 23 Sep, Melbourne Fringe Festival, The Cavern Table Studios 
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