Drama Essay
Matt Cameron’s play Ruby Moon addresses Australian cultural issues, as well as the characters’ personal issues and concerns. How are these issues and concerns made engaging and challenging for an audience? Refer to study and workshop
Matt Cameron’s play Ruby Moon is an engaging and episodic play that employs Australian cultural issues as well as character issues and concerns. These techniques are used effectively through the freedom of practitioners in staging and characterisation. Ruby Moon combines the elements of absurdism, gothic horror, and fairy tales with the paranoia of suburban myths as well as drawing upon from real-life headlines about missing children.
The Australian psyche has a long held fascination with the stories of lost children. The ‘lost child’ narrative is instilled with a sense of loss interwoven by the possibility of returning home. Typically, the Australian ‘lost child’ story involves an innocent child who becomes disoriented and frightened, and learns a lesson about the limits to their survival skills. In many cases, some never return leaving us to contemplate the worst. Matt Cameron explores this using grotesque fairy tale motifs as well as drawing from real-life newspaper headlines. In Scene 8 we are introduced to the character Dawn. This scene explores the complexity of the baby-sitter as a character. Dawn is an opposite character relating to Ray and Sylvie, just as they have lost their daughter, Dawn has lost her parents. This meeting between Ray and Dawn also provides the audience with another side to Ruby that was not previously known- “Real mean streak.” This idea that Ruby is not as innocent as she seems is continuously forced upon the audience, although Matt Cameron never lets us see Ruby as she truly was. He explores this social construct- of children being innocent- but does not allow the audience to fully comprehend this idea, instead provoking more questions than answering them.
Matt Cameron’s play Ruby Moon is an engaging and episodic play that employs Australian cultural issues as well as character issues and concerns. These techniques are used effectively through the freedom of practitioners in staging and characterisation. Ruby Moon combines the elements of absurdism, gothic horror, and fairy tales with the paranoia of suburban myths as well as drawing upon from real-life headlines about missing children.
The Australian psyche has a long held fascination with the stories of lost children. The ‘lost child’ narrative is instilled with a sense of loss interwoven by the possibility of returning home. Typically, the Australian ‘lost child’ story involves an innocent child who becomes disoriented and frightened, and learns a lesson about the limits to their survival skills. In many cases, some never return leaving us to contemplate the worst. Matt Cameron explores this using grotesque fairy tale motifs as well as drawing from real-life newspaper headlines. In Scene 8 we are introduced to the character Dawn. This scene explores the complexity of the baby-sitter as a character. Dawn is an opposite character relating to Ray and Sylvie, just as they have lost their daughter, Dawn has lost her parents. This meeting between Ray and Dawn also provides the audience with another side to Ruby that was not previously known- “Real mean streak.” This idea that Ruby is not as innocent as she seems is continuously forced upon the audience, although Matt Cameron never lets us see Ruby as she truly was. He explores this social construct- of children being innocent- but does not allow the audience to fully comprehend this idea, instead provoking more questions than answering them.