You embark on a bus from the Footscray Community Arts Centre with everyone else, and as it pulls out, one of your fellow passengers, a man in a suit, takes a phone call - it doesn't sound like it goes well. Next, gradually, a conversation stutteringly develops between him and the woman sitting next to him.
On the way out, along a busy road, you look out the window at the urban landscape and see a woman mounted on horseback and dressed for the part; the horse rears and gallops alongside briefly before the bus outdistances horse and rider.
Weaving through and around the Docklands and looking out the many windows of the bus (screens), you begin to wonder what's performance and what's real - if you're alert, you might also see, recurring along the route but in the distance amidst everyone going about their Saturday afternoon, a lone man with the appearance of a cowboy.
The discussion on the bus continues at intervals, music rising from time to time as soundtrack and score; he's in the dairy business and possibly less than entirely scrupulous in his dealings with farmers, while she seems more like one of life's little people, a battler of sorts maybe. The conversation touches on their life circumstances, shame, responsibility, oligarchy, the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven (they both know it).
On the way back, the Docklands left behind, the tone of the conversation turns accusatory and the woman now speaks for the farmers who have been exploited - she is one of them, in a way that's possibly literal but doesn't entirely matter. Him: "Hang on, where am I?" The bus pulls into what seems to be a truck stop, completely with (closed) diner at the entrance. There are parked trucks, a man sitting sullenly in hi-vis watching the bus pull in; the cowboy appears again, lean and still and looking into the distance, and the music takes on a Morricone-esque flavour. The bus slows, inches through a narrow gap into a clear lot, and wordlessly the man obeys the woman's (equally wordless) command they he get off. He walks agitatedly ahead with her behind him; they stop, face each other, and the woman on the horse from earlier reappears. The bus circles slowly, round and round, like the camera panning around the climactic show down in a western movie - and then you leave them, facing each other beneath the gaze of that same silent rider.
(w/ trang)
Produced by Jessica Wilson - and in case this wasn't obvious, a most enjoyable piece of theatre that makes very good use of its bus and city setting (the former of those working as a particularly intimate seating 'in the round', while the external elements also played out all around)
On the way out, along a busy road, you look out the window at the urban landscape and see a woman mounted on horseback and dressed for the part; the horse rears and gallops alongside briefly before the bus outdistances horse and rider.
Weaving through and around the Docklands and looking out the many windows of the bus (screens), you begin to wonder what's performance and what's real - if you're alert, you might also see, recurring along the route but in the distance amidst everyone going about their Saturday afternoon, a lone man with the appearance of a cowboy.
The discussion on the bus continues at intervals, music rising from time to time as soundtrack and score; he's in the dairy business and possibly less than entirely scrupulous in his dealings with farmers, while she seems more like one of life's little people, a battler of sorts maybe. The conversation touches on their life circumstances, shame, responsibility, oligarchy, the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven (they both know it).
On the way back, the Docklands left behind, the tone of the conversation turns accusatory and the woman now speaks for the farmers who have been exploited - she is one of them, in a way that's possibly literal but doesn't entirely matter. Him: "Hang on, where am I?" The bus pulls into what seems to be a truck stop, completely with (closed) diner at the entrance. There are parked trucks, a man sitting sullenly in hi-vis watching the bus pull in; the cowboy appears again, lean and still and looking into the distance, and the music takes on a Morricone-esque flavour. The bus slows, inches through a narrow gap into a clear lot, and wordlessly the man obeys the woman's (equally wordless) command they he get off. He walks agitatedly ahead with her behind him; they stop, face each other, and the woman on the horse from earlier reappears. The bus circles slowly, round and round, like the camera panning around the climactic show down in a western movie - and then you leave them, facing each other beneath the gaze of that same silent rider.
(w/ trang)
Produced by Jessica Wilson - and in case this wasn't obvious, a most enjoyable piece of theatre that makes very good use of its bus and city setting (the former of those working as a particularly intimate seating 'in the round', while the external elements also played out all around)
