Ruby Moon Analysis

As the director and dramaturge for a fully mounted production of, Ruby Moon by Matt Cameron for a festival with a focus on Australian society I must select a relevant scene for an audience to promote the entire play. Ruby Moon was written in 2003 by Matt Cameron (1969), a Melbourne playwright who was heavily “influenced by headlines in the newspaper” regarding missing children which sparked many of his plot lines. His plays, in particular Ruby Moon, comment on the notion of a decimated community where there is no longer any communication between neighbours and how the suburbs are now deemed as unsafe and frightening. This is the paradox of Flaming Tree Grove, the street where Ruby Moon sets off to visit her grandmothers and is never seen again.
Ruby Moon is a fractured fairytale. The dramatic structure is cyclical and episodic. It is episodic in that it contains a prologue and an epilogue with a series of ten short, self-contained scenes which run strictly with no interval, each scene having its own narrative and complication. It is a contemporary Australian drama containing absurdist elements with many different acting styles such as representational, presentational, heightened naturalism, absurdism and mime with influences from Growtoski. To promote the play, I decided to preview Scene Seven to an audience as it best represents this decimated community at stake throughout this play which is a reacurring theme while also containing many Australian influences, being a place of high tension, engaging the audience and persuading them to see the rest of that
I must be able to shape, interpret and use the elements of drama to create particular effects for an audience. To enhance conflict I decided to place Ruby and Ray upstage so that they have a closer proximity with the audience. I decided to create many pauses between Sylvie and Ray’s dialogue to redefine the conflict. For example when Sylvie says, ‘Ray…? Where’s Ruby?’ and Ray responds with, ‘I don’t know, Sylvie! I don’t know!’ I decided to place the actors so that they’re facing each other with a pause after Ray’s dialogue to show the climatic moment. I decided for Sylvie to imagine the mannequin of Ruby is outside the front under the street lamp so she is looking out into the audience enhancing the conflict revolving around the missing mannequin which she says. ‘The mannequin! She’s not under the street lamp. Somebody’s taken her. Who could be that cruel?’ Sylvie is looking out frantically into the audience making the audience feel uncomfortable and uneasy enhancing the conflict of this missing mannequin. One last way in which conflict is shown is through the body part of Ruby being sent in a parcel and how they don’t know the answers to who sent it and why and how it event got there reinforcing the invasion of a safe neighbourhood. For