Ruby Moon Essay
DRAMA ESSAY
Breanna Burgess
Australian theatre practitioners use various performance styles, techniques and dramatic conventions to help portray their ideas to their audiences and make them feel a particular way to the ideas presented in a play. Without the use of these styles, techniques and conventions it wouldn’t be possible for the practitioners to emphasise their ideas. In the play ‘Ruby Moon’ Matt Cameron the playwright uses various techniques such as symbolism, transformational acting, cyclical and episodic dramatic structure and a fractured fairytale. Ruby Moon was written by Matt Cameron in 2003. It is a story about a well known tragedy. In Flaming Tree Grove everything seems to be perfect. A young girl, Ruby Moon disappears after she sets off to her grandmothers. After parcels of mannequin doll parts arrive on Ruby Moons parents door step; Ray and Sylvie Moon. They walk up and down the street to question their neighbours to try and solve the mystery of their daughters’ disappearance. All we discover is that life behind the doors of suburbia isn’t quite right and the mystery of the missing child is never fully resolved. Matt Cameron wrote this play after he grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne as he states ‘precariously pleased with itself.’ ‘Neighbours dutifully waved but had no idea who each other really was or what went on over the fence, behind the curtains.’ As Tess Brady responds to Matt Cameron’s work she says ‘Cameron holds a lens up to the ordinary and shows us how disturbing, how provocative it can be’. ‘Makes the safe frightening and if the safe is frightening where do we go to hide.’
Symbolism plays a huge effect of the play and the way the audience may understand the ideas Matt Cameron is trying to convey. The knocks at the door (the wizard) I believe symbol the real, outside world trying to bring some normality to Ray and Sylvie’s lives. But the normality is portrayed as something scary. The knocks torment Sylvie the most
Breanna Burgess
Australian theatre practitioners use various performance styles, techniques and dramatic conventions to help portray their ideas to their audiences and make them feel a particular way to the ideas presented in a play. Without the use of these styles, techniques and conventions it wouldn’t be possible for the practitioners to emphasise their ideas. In the play ‘Ruby Moon’ Matt Cameron the playwright uses various techniques such as symbolism, transformational acting, cyclical and episodic dramatic structure and a fractured fairytale. Ruby Moon was written by Matt Cameron in 2003. It is a story about a well known tragedy. In Flaming Tree Grove everything seems to be perfect. A young girl, Ruby Moon disappears after she sets off to her grandmothers. After parcels of mannequin doll parts arrive on Ruby Moons parents door step; Ray and Sylvie Moon. They walk up and down the street to question their neighbours to try and solve the mystery of their daughters’ disappearance. All we discover is that life behind the doors of suburbia isn’t quite right and the mystery of the missing child is never fully resolved. Matt Cameron wrote this play after he grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne as he states ‘precariously pleased with itself.’ ‘Neighbours dutifully waved but had no idea who each other really was or what went on over the fence, behind the curtains.’ As Tess Brady responds to Matt Cameron’s work she says ‘Cameron holds a lens up to the ordinary and shows us how disturbing, how provocative it can be’. ‘Makes the safe frightening and if the safe is frightening where do we go to hide.’
Symbolism plays a huge effect of the play and the way the audience may understand the ideas Matt Cameron is trying to convey. The knocks at the door (the wizard) I believe symbol the real, outside world trying to bring some normality to Ray and Sylvie’s lives. But the normality is portrayed as something scary. The knocks torment Sylvie the most