Last Night I Dreamt My House Was Leaking, by Amanda Price & Mary Steadman (Famous & Divine) at The Place, Bedford, 28th February, 2009.
“I opened my eyes and I saw her at the end of my bed, for a brief second” was our first tantalising glimpse into the darkly disturbing supernatural world created by Amanda Price & Mary Steadman, which veered between the sometimes comic to the horrifically erotic, thinly veiled bridge between life, death & nightmarish Lynchian dreamscape world of tragic Marie, in a piece loosely inspired by Büchner’s incomplete Woyzeck.
Like Woyzeck, in which the surviving manuscript has been chopped and changed in an attempt to find some kind of definitive linearity, Last Night I Dreamt My House Was Leaking cleverly deconstructed the looping narrative constantly, offering as many feasible variations to the theme of “Fifty Ways to Kill Your Lover” as could be imagined in this highly original devised work, through repetitive imagery and dialogue in an unsettling way, replaying the last steps and final moments of Mary Steadman’s heart-wrenching tortured soul Marie, as she finally succumbs to her eventual fate at the hands of maniacal Johnny, just one of multiple roles played with convincing vigour by Amanda Price.
Amateur ghost hunters and Stone Tape Theorists would recognise the futility of the spectral playbacks, interspersed as they were by the repeating spooky motif of a red dress and clicking heel of a single black shoe when Marie was relentlessly pursued by an invisible tormentor in an energetic chase of psychic proportions. No phantom stone of recent popular horror was left unturned as grotesque poltergeists and psychic detectives invaded the space with comic aplomb, whilst making disconcerting use of the simple set and mundane props, where anything from a discarded carrier bag to a pair of yellow marigolds took on a sinister twist, or from the discordant language where the “Moon was made of rotten old wood” and the “Stars are squashed midges stuck to the sky”.
Spirits were not dampened by the technical issues which dogged the performance, apparently characteristic throughout the whole devising process in which attempts to capture the piece on DVD & audio has resulted in phantasmic failure, but in this case was down to the Electricity Board blowing a mains fuse! However, for a debut offering, this coupling promises to be one worth watching in the future. Nothing was compromised in this two-hander as both Steadman and Price switched between character, time and place with consummate ease, at times autobiographical and others completely fictional, but at the same time completely blurring the boundaries between the two states. Whether Price really was spooked out of her Rutland home is a mystery. If the audience left the theatre wondering quite whether they could afford to look over their shoulders, or look in their rear view mirrors, remains a piece of Famous and Divine intervention.
