Ruby Moon

Matt Cameron

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781921428746
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

In Flaming Tree Grove, life appears to be picture perfect. Security and privacy are coveted and seclusion is its own reward. Until the day when little Ruby sets off to visit her grandmother at the end of the cul-de-sac and is never seen again. The neighbourhood fractures into grief and suspicion in the search for answers to a terrible deprivation. Then a parcel arrives on her parents' doorstep...

RUBY MOON

Matt Cameron

Currency Press, Sydney

MATT CAMERON is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. His plays include Tear from a Glass Eye, winner of the Wal Cherry Play of the Year Award with productions by Playbox, Black Swan and the Gate Theatre in London, where he was nominated Most Promising Playwright in the Evening Standard Awards; Footprints on Water, winner of the British Council International New Playwriting Award with productions by Neonheart, Griffin and La Mama; Mr Melancholy, winner of the ANPC/New Dramatists Award with productions by Griffin, La Boite, Chameleon, New York Stage & Film in New York, Theatre de l’Erre in Paris and Teatr Ad Spectatores in Poland; and The Eskimo Calling, produced by Neonheart and Belvoir B Sharp. Hinterland, nominated for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award; Man the Balloon, nominated for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award; and a short play Whispering Death were all produced by Melbourne Theatre Company. Ruby Moon was nominated for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and has been produced by Playbox, Neonheart and Théâtre Claque in Switzerland. Screen credits include Seachange, Crashburn and co-creator/co-writer/director of the AWGIE award-winning Introducing Gary Petty.

INTRODUCTION

Matt Cameron

In many ways the published play defies the essentially ephemeral nature of theatre. I happen to subscribe to the notion that a play is only ever truly finished when the playwright is dead. Hence, fortuitously, I have continued to tinker with the text of Ruby Moon and now, much to my pernickety relief, here is the new version developed courtesy of Aidan Fennessy’s stunning production for Playbox and Neonheart. The originally published text contained, to my chagrin, several sequences which were removed or improved in rehearsals, previews and subsequent performances. However, despite these initial script flaws, I was extremely fortunate to have the play realised in its first incarnation by a talented team of artists collaborating at the peak of their considerable powers and I owe them all a debt of gratitude.

Ruby Moon is a story about a little girl who sets off to visit her grandma, just like a fairytale, but never arrives. The child randomly taken from our midst is an all-too-common tragedy which threatens us in a deeply primal way. Innocence is corrupted and our world is distorted, with even the benign rendered ominous. This play is acutely theatrical in its conceit and set in the fictional Flaming Tree Grove, a slice of David Lynch suburbia where a dark underbelly lurks beneath an idyllic, picture-perfect veneer.

I grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne among rows of anonymous and homogenous houses, a place precariously pleased with itself, a time of slow summer days etched with the echo of Mr Whippy’s ice-cream van, of streets filled with children enchanted by the clarion call of ‘Greensleeves’. Mr Whippy was suburbia’s Pied Piper, crawling by in hypnotically sinister slow motion. Even if you didn’t have coins in your pocket you’d run after him in the hope of a benevolent miracle. Mostly you ended up watching smug children lick their ice-creams. But even the watching was an event.

It was a world where neighbours dutifully waved but had no idea who each other really was or what went on over the fence, behind the curtains. For that is the ingenious deceit of suburbia: that proximity equals intimacy, fraternity, community. The suburbs can be a very lonely p...