Like the warzones it depicts, From The Rubble is fractured and unsettling, shocking its audience with sudden jolts of terror as it tells the story of the civilian cost of military conflict. Based on the experiences of West Australian journalist Sophie McNeill in reporting from the Middle East, the piece unfolds as a series of vignettes situated around three young girls struggling to find normalcy amongst the ruins of the war-ravaged home.
That narrative thread serves as the backdrop for the play’s discomforting meditations on survival which unfurl in a multimedia phantasmagoria. The sparse set design – of torn blank paper surrounded by brittle paper walls – provides a canvas for a series of projections both real and surreal, live action and stop motion, each of them utterly compelling, as when in a particularly brilliant display of visual artistry, bullet holes are transformed into a starry night’s sky. Newsreader Tracy Vo’s narration provides a darkly comic context to the horror that the play’s three actors merely hint at as the situation worsens; with every passing soundbite, Vo’s authoritative voice gives way to panic and fear, providing a rare and humanising quality to the cold and unemotional tone media consumers expect.
The real brilliance of this piece lies in Joe Lui’s sound design and his compositions with performer Mei Saraswati – though visually stark, Lui and Saraswati create a vivid sonic world that makes From The Rubble a compelling piece of contemporary theatre and a triumph of nonlinear storytelling.
