November 21 , 2011
\nFeast Festival
\nAdelaide
\nTheatre<\/p>\n
The Dead Ones
\nby Margie Fischer
\nVitalstatistix Theatre Company
\nHigher Ground, Light Square, Adelaide.
\nNovember 20 . Tickets $15- $20
\nBookings : Ph.08 84630684
\nUntil November 26.<\/p>\n
What are memories when there is no one left to share them ? What are the traces of a family when there is no-one to identify the people in the photograph or recognize a favourite book or chair ? In The Dead Ones , theatre director, writer and Feast Festival co-founder, Margie Fischer\u2019s deftly weighted, beautifully detailed monologue about clearing and selling the family home in Sydney\u2019s East Lindfield, we are reminded that the ties that bind inevitably transmute from the physical to the ethereal. <\/p>\n
Director Catherine Fitzgerald shrewdly describes the work as \u201cpart obituary, part theatre, part slideshow, part lecture, part wake, part homage to William Yang.\u201d It is all of these, and, like Yang\u2019s famous solo work Sadness, it covers painful territory without becoming mired or self absorbed. Fischer\u2019s signature, right back to the early days of her theatre company Vitalstatistix, has always been sharp and zany – perceptive, full of feeling, but finding a lightness to express the darkness, stealing a wry smile from adversity. <\/p>\n
And , in the Fischer family story, there is plenty of adversity to recall. Barely escaping with their lives from Nazi occupied Austria in 1938, her Jewish parents Alois and Marianne, fled first to Shanghai for ten years before arriving in Sydney in 1949. The paternal grandparents also escaped, but the rest of the extended family died in concentration camps. This is a vigorous story of resourceful \u201crefos\u201d as Alois himself called them, setting up the thriving furniture business, Fischer\u2019s Modern Homes Pty Ltd. Fischer describes growing up speaking Yiddish at home while she and her brother Peter (who died tragically of spinal cancer at age 22) explored the lifestyle of post-war Australian teenagers. <\/p>\n
Using photographs, documents and evocative music (including The Sound of Music\u2019s Eidelweis) Fischer describes, with a kind of circling narrative, the lives of the family and their eventual deaths. It is a diary of days spent in the house after her mother, the last inhabitant, dies in 2003. Photographs, books, lovingly made items of furniture, a large collection of square-fronted nightdresses, men\u2019s ties, a terminally ill young man\u2019s model ship \u2013 what is to be done with these ? It\u2019s to the hard rubbish, the incinerator, the op-shops and deceased estate removalists \u2013 but each item is considered one last time and given its place in a now evaporating history. <\/p>\n
Deceptive in its apparent simplicity. The Dead Ones covers a lot of ground with the repetitions of text and image gathering complexity and intensity as Fischer memorably chronicles one family \u2013 but reminds us of all families. <\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
BRIEF<\/p>\n
What are memories when there is no one left to share them ? What are the traces of a family when there is no-one to identify the people in the photograph or recognize a favourite book or chair ? In The Dead Ones , theatre director, writer and Feast Festival co-founder, Margie Fischer\u2019s deftly weighted, beautifully detailed monologue about clearing and selling the family home in Sydney\u2019s East Lindfield, we are reminded that the ties that bind inevitably transmute from the physical to the ethereal. <\/p>\n
Deceptive in its apparent simplicity. The Dead Ones covers a lot of ground with the repetitions of text and image gathering complexity and intensity as Fischer memorably chronicles one family \u2013 but reminds us of all families. <\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
\u201cDaughter picks through the many pieces left by her lost family\u201d The Australian, November 22, 2011, p.14.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
November 21 , 2011 Feast Festival Adelaide Theatre The Dead Ones by Margie Fischer Vitalstatistix Theatre Company Higher Ground, Light Square, Adelaide. November 20 . Tickets $15- $20 Bookings : Ph.08 84630684 Until November 26. What are memories when there is no one left to share them ? What are the traces of a family when there is no-one to identify the people in the photograph or recognize a favourite book or chair ? In The Dead Ones , theatre […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,17,5,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-22","category-adelaide-companies","category-archive","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1770"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1772,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770\/revisions\/1772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}