Death On A String

Better known for children's shows like the Dinosaur Petting Zoo and I, Bunyip, visual and physical theatre company Erth are using the Sydney Festival to debut their first 'adult' show, Murder. “It's been an idea that I've been obsessing over for the last five years,” says director Scott Wright without hint of exaggeration. “It's all about breaking the mould. People have this perception that we make children's theatre, or family theatre, but we're just artists who do what we want, and it just seemed the right time for us to be doing a show for our peers and for our friends and for ourselves that allowed us to go to darker places and ask big questions.”

The seed for the show was planted in Wright's mind by none other than Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, their Murder Ballads album piquing his interest in our culture's obsession with violence, “There's a difference between serial killers and mass murderers, and thrill killers and impulse killers; there's murder by domestic violence, there's murder by misadventure, there's a lot of fundamental differences between different types of murders. One of the things was we were looking to see [if] whether it was possible for there to be good murder, so in a sense, a mercy killing.”

The theatrical device that allows Wright and co. to probe so perversely into this subject matter is the very same that allowed Erth to bring dinosaurs back from extinction, and put lifelike elephants on a cruise ship – puppetry.

“Puppetry does allow you to do things that are more taboo or darker, simply because they're objects, you can do it over and over again – you know, you can kill a puppet and then you can bring it back to life and then kill it again and again and again. There's something about it, because it's not human, then you slightly divorce yourself from it a little bit.”

That distance from the 'human' has allowed Erth's treatment on murder to truly delve deep, but the skill of the performers (who are working to choreography by Kate Champion) can threaten that distance, and that, says Wright, is when Murder becomes truly unsettling, “There's the other end of that spectrum where if the puppet is operated really well, then you begin to empathise with it. Freud refers to it as the 'Uncanny Valley'.”

The term, coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970 furthers Ernst Jentsch's and Freud's psychological theories of the uncanny. The 'valley' refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of humans as a function of a robot's human likeness, the point where that distance is irrelevant.

“We went as far as we could; we've tortured, assaulted, sodomised and cut people up in our creative development. We needed to go pretty dark in order to know what our limit was. And all these different categories of murder meant that there had to be a distillation process, we had to allow all these things to crystallise so that we could look at what the essential ingredients were.”

Having walked through the valley, Wright and co. have emerged with a show that will no doubt shake the belief that Erth only do family-friendly theatre.