Ruby Moon

An Exploration of “RUBY MOON”

By Robert McCuaig

Significant Australian theatre has always provided a level of insight into the Australian identity. That insight might be historical, anthropological, social or political, but it will ultimately use the theatrical experience to venture into often uncertain and sometimes uncomfortable ground. Matt Cameron’s Ruby Moon is no exception to this, indeed disturbingly so, taking the audience into the dark recesses of our deeper fears. In this sense alone, Ruby Moon is a remarkable piece of theatre that subverts the general sense of security and normality often associated with suburban Australia. It is a macabre and a disturbing tale that strikes an emotional chord deep at the heart of the Australian psyche. Cameron unsettles our sense of well being by going behind the façade of suburbia and beyond the safety of the picket fence to open the front door on what we all wish to keep behind closed doors, our fear and our suspicion that all is not as we would wish it to be.
The play revolves around the disappearance and likely abduction of a young girl; an occurrence which Cameron describes as “an all-to-common tragedy which threatens us in a deeply primal way.” Though Ruby Moon’s disappearance wholly dominates the play, the theatrical experience of Ruby Moon goes far beyond the mystery of a young girl’s disappearance. Elements of the crime mystery genre are present and the audience, along with the two central characters, Ray and Sylvie, investigate and weigh up the clues. Unfortunately, in the nebulous and surreal world created by Cameron, the flashlight in the dark shines little light on the truth.
There is an existentialist element to Ruby Moon engendered in the futility of Ray and Sylvie’s investigation and in the ultimate revelation that they are doomed to repeat the play’s action over and over again. In the Absurdist tradition Ray and Sylvie’s quest leads nowhere. They search in vain for the answer to the loss of their little girl but little is provided to the audience that will satisfy answers to questions that arise in the play and which go straight to the heart of the human condition.
In that the play is set in the suburbs, it is quintessentially Australian. The urban dream, often couched in idyllic notions of tranquility and community, is an aspiration deeply present in the Australian psyche, representing security and a benchmark of achievement. But none of this is present in Cameron’s play. Instead, the setting is distorted to become something of a universal backdrop for the human condition. The close knitted community that we associate with the suburban dream is gone and instead the focus is on the disconnectedness that is more and more being perceived to be an emerging aspect of contemporary suburban life where neighbours are strangers, sequestered behind closed doors. Cameron takes this truth and in a nightmarish conceit extends far beyond “Ramsay Street” to create an existential and surrealist carnival of characters set against a macabre and frightening backdrop of possibility and recrimination. It is a dark world from which it is hard to imagine the central characters ever freeing themselves.
A common element in Australian literature is the sense of identity that is born out of both a real and perceived sense of isolation from the rest of the world. Cameron’s vision is a surreal extension of this notion of isolation but one which need look no further than the neighbourhood street. In this sense, some elements within the play reflect broader concerns that have emerged in contemporary Australian society: That there is not a greater sense of community but a lesser sense of belonging and that people today feel less secure in many aspects of their lives. The world may be more global in economic terms but there is no global village, not in any meaningful sense that the term connotes. Today, more so than ever, the home is a retreat from the world outside. Backyards are smaller and houses sprout fortress like from ever shrinking suburban blocks.
Australia, like all modern western nations, lives in the shadow of the fallen towers. Ruby Moon in its disposition is a post 9/11 play. It reflects this, not in subject but in its treatment of subject. It is a play that is written in a time when distrust, fear and insecurity at home have never before so dominated the national psyche. Within the play, the sense of isolation dominates. For all their attempts to venture into the neighbourhood, Sylvie and Ray never really leave their home. They are trapped in their own self created and inward looking world where their search for the truth is vain a cycle of recrimination.
In Ross Cameron’s play, not unlike the filmic visions of David Lynch, the suburban setting is like a third character that morphs and shapes the fears of the two protagonists. The play is not about reality per say but about perceptions which in turn shape the form and style of the play itself. The appearance and demeanor of the neighbourhood characters owes less to any objective reality than to the distorted view of Ray and Sylvie who see the world through the lens of distrust, prejudice and fear. The play is a world created by them; a fabrication and an elaboration of the little they can glean as they peer through the curtains. They see only pieces of a whole and so their imagination must complete the picture. Their neighbours are the fragmented creations of suspicion; they are not real, not yet anyway. As the character Dawn says, “I am not a real person yet. But I’m going to become one”. In their desperation to know the truth, Sylvie and Ray construct a deeply personal reality to solve the riddle of their child’s disappearance. They create a nightmare of possibilities, and their neighbourhood instead of being a place of refuge becomes a perversion of the suburban idyll, a nightmarish backdrop to their fears, populated by villains, mad scientists, perverts etc.
Ruby Moon is essentially a twisted fairy tale for grown ups but like all fairytales it has at its heart a central truth of possibility. Boogey men don’t lurk under the bed and in the wardrobe, but strangers can break into our homes and steal from us. In Ruby Moon Cameron confronts his audience with the greatest of urban fears. Ray and Sylvie experience the nightmare that lies on the horizon of urban culture, like the wolf in the forest, waiting for the neglectful parent.
Given this, Cameron’s treatment is a truthful and deft rendering of the psychological trauma and torment that is the reality of this urban horror tale. Modern suburbia is forever vulnerable to those who will take from it, and nothing is more heinous or threatening then the theft of a child. The strength of the play emanates from this central fear that resonates with all those who have children. The mystery at the heart of Ruby Moon is not what happened to Ruby, when it happened, why it happened or indeed whether it happened. These concerns may drive the drama but it is the psychological journey of the two protagonists that is the play’s real focus.
Ray and Sylvie appear to be on a never ending cycle of re-enactment; like tormented spirits caught in their own hell, they relive their pain each night. The play is overtly theatrical in its style and there is an obvious allusion to the theatrical process itself. We are audience to a play within a play and Cameron is very conscious of this in creating the artifice of Ruby Moon. “The theatre is, quite wonderfully artifice. Its very lifeblood is the suspension of disbelief. It is about doors within false walls that seem real, that lead nowhere and yet everywhere, and behind them, and beyond them, the world of our imagination.” The world of Ruby Moon is an invitation into the world of the imagination; that of the playwright, that of the play’s two characters and ultimately our own as we empathise and find our own demons behind imaginary closed doors. Theatre, as Cameron quite rightly asserts, “Exists in the imagination of the beholder.”
His philosophy is apparent in the minimalist staging and the portrayal of the menagerie of characters by the play’s two actors. The setting is described as “a timeless and placeless world”. If the minimalist approach requires of the audience to suspend disbelief than the grotesque and haunting motifs beckon the audience to go further into the subconscious and into the collective fears that we all hold.
Cameron states that the play is as much about what is unseen as that which is seen. “A solitary spotlight on an actor on an otherwise dark stage draws our eye to the character and the story they tell within that light, but it also makes us wonder about the darkness being pierced. What do we imagine exists in that darkness?” Throughout the play, Cameron cleverly employs symbols and imagery that resonate in our imaginations helping us to pierce the darkness and fill the void just as his two central characters do. The blood red velvet curtain, the blood red moon, the bare branches of blackened trees, the rocking horse rocking with no one upon it, the mysterious package and solitary street lamp have universal meaning not out of place in the horror movie genre. The use of a scrim allows for the sudden appearance and disappearance of objects and images, a technique inherent to most contemporary horror films.
The motif of the doll, like the mannequin, is a particularly poignant and haunting example and one that resonates with meaning on more than one level. In the context of the play, Ruby’s doll is a sad and tainted memory of Ray and Sylvie’s daughter. Human like yet lifeless, the doll, as in much theatre and film, is a reminder of the real daughter, the life that is no more. When Ruby’s doll is dismembered it very obviously symbolises the violence that may have been perpetrated against the young girl. In Scene 10, Ray picks up the headless doll, “pulls the cord and Ruby’s creepy voice plays. Her ghostly whisper reverberates like a secret.”
Throughout the play, sound is cleverly used also to create atmosphere and focus our attention. The disembodied voice of the answering machine and its final beep adds to the sense of Ray and Sylvie’s isolation and further plays with the notion of time passing. Elsewhere, the whistling wind, the echo of wind chimes, a creaking tree, the naïve piano refrain, the ironic use of the Greensleeves melody, the sound of a needle on a scratchy gramophone, the lullaby played on a music box, thunder rumbling, the ominous knock on the door and the distorted sound of Ruby giggling are all used to effect.
Ray and Sylvie’s neighbours are grotesque embodiments of the couple’s fears and prejudices. Though Ray and Sylvie ostensibly visit each of them, in reality neither of them leave the besieged world of their imagination. Their home becomes something of a House of Wax wherein they both transform to become the people they despise and distrust, like effigies brought to life in a strange ritual. Each night they conjure the neighbours to perhaps find that one clue that will be conclusive and that will finally close the book. Each night, however, suspicion casts a broad shadow over all in Flame tree Grove: The senile and evangelistic Dulcie, perfunctory and obsessed with her parrot believes Ruby to be a bad girl now in the arms of God. Sid, the simple clown in his blood stained singlet who played with Ruby and made her face disappear. The strength of Ray and Sylvie’s anger and the hate is revealed when Sid relives the interrogation where he is cast as a “pervert” and a “sick freak”. The licentious, pained and medicated Veronica, who stars each evening in a song and strip show for the neighbourhood and who claims to dislike little girls and to loathe innocence, believing that the innocent get what they deserve. The paranoid and retributive loner Sonny Jim believes that Ruby may have had a crush on him. He was also seen digging in the church late at night. The awkward and sad Dawn who is full of self loathing and seemingly obsessed with the couple’s missing daughter makes small Ruby Moon dolls and admits to holding strange thoughts inside her head. Finally we meet the failed and forlorn Professor Ogle who is frightened by the enormity, power and mystery of the universe but who, just like Sylvie and Ray, wishes to reach into its unknown. He seeks answers in the world of quantum physics, speaks of “astrophysical terms” and “revolutionary concepts” where people can simply vanish down “portable black holes” laid out like a mat by a cartoon rabbit.
All of the characters in their own way deal with pain of some kind and each retreats into an imaginary world in order to find some sense in the way of things. It is here, at their very core, that Ray and Sylvie are the genesis of each of these characters. In each of the characters lie the fears, prejudices and vulnerability of the protagonists. When Sonny Jim says that he couldn’t live with himself if he was the father, we are witnessing the personification of Ray’s most painful thought.
. Whether the characters that haunt Ray and Sylvie are partly or wholly fabricated is not as important as how they function on a symbolic level to connect the audience to Ray and Sylvie’s plight. Just as the characters arouse suspicion in the two protagonists they too arouse suspicion in the audience and so uncover prejudices and fears in each of us. Our imaginations are drawn into the world created by Cameron and we, the audience, find elements of our own humanity, “the backstage of our existence”, good and bad, in “the darkness being pierced.”
In the expressionist and surreal world created by Matt Cameron the characters are, by necessity, stylized beyond normality, personifying elements of threat and suspicion. The challenge for the two actors is to range between each of these eccentric roles and not lose the focus of the distinct fear engendered by each.
The challenge for the director is to not lose the thread that binds each of these characters and which, when performed, will entwine the imagination of the audience and so draw them into the world of the play. The director needs to walk the audience down the dark path created by Cameron. At the core of the play is the disappearance of a little girl and the deeply felt pain that accompanies this. All good tales of horror invite the audience to step into the shoes of the protagonists. Even if not consciously thought, the question is there, subliminally, “What if it were I?” Ruby Moon does exactly that and then forces us to confront our own fears and prejudices. The role of the play’s director is to do all to intensify that experience and then allow the audience to deconstruct the message for themselves.
Direction can be seen as a process of selection and emphasis; where to place the focus and where not to. This selection applies to all aspects of the directorial process from thematic concerns, aspects of character through to the balance of production elements. In Ruby Moon this is acutely important. Vital to the effectiveness of any horror story is the balance between that which is seen and that which is not. This awareness is clearly evident in the dramaturgy of the script and it is important for the director of any production of Ruby Moon to bring an awareness of this to any production of the play.
Real horror will come from that which is not seen but imagined. No one needs to jump out from the darkly lit path, but it is the thought that they might that scares each of us.
Ruby Moon is a fractured fairytale for its time. In the end the answer lies within and not from without. Ray and Sylvie must ask questions about themselves before they will find answers to the inexplicable and the same can be said for the audience. And like all good fairytales it is about something that happens to someone else and not ourselves and this makes the drama all the more alluring.