THE MASTERS Cameron Sievers

The Library Artspace is hosting 
A Fractured Femur Theatre Production

The Masters 

written and directed by  Cameron Sievers

Set amid a disturbingly commonplace domestic landscape,   The Masters is a language-based, two act piece of naturalistic subversion for six players. The strength of this murky farce lies in its subtle straddling between naturalism and absurdity, the use of the strata of society (landowner, mortgage holders, renter/tenant, mortgage defaulter  and homeless), and the depiction of a contemporary concern: obsession with home ownership. In perverse, confronting, and blackly humorous fashion, the play explores themes of domestic entrapment, power, and suppression. An unnerving, nihilistic pulse underscores the drama capturing the menace of a common situation – a rental payment transaction. Ruud and Ruth, mortgage holders and landlords to a tenant who lives beneath them, await payment upstairs. It is a tortuous delay. Motion, air, and stillness combine to bring a subtext-laden tension suggestive of inveterate scars and secrets, as their journey exposes the horror of their existence and all manner of bleak excesses: domestic violence, attempted murder, sexual depravity, and something much, much worse... “What could you possibly confess, Gerald? You have a family, a wife. Four walls.”

This is the third part of the DNA strand that brought you  The Game and Anhedonia. Sievers, on the cusp of his twelfth production, says: “It is within language that I explore and heighten the horror of the everyday through the subversion of mundane states. There are clear reasons for this work to exist; but I reject an issues-based approach  to theatre. For various reasons too much theatre is too determined to be about something." The Masters is about everything and nothing; yet remains highly contemporary. As opposed to a linear exploration of  what’s in the room or a surface conflict between men and women, it offers  something older. It offers a world in which a room becomes more than a room over time. A room, after-all, has horrifying possibilities.

Gallery address: 
The Library Artspace,
100 Barkly St Nth Fitzroy.
Season: 11 November – 27 November 8:30pm
$24 / $18

Bookings: 0425 813 007
Group bookings available.
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