THE FLOOD

About the play

 

A dark story about memory, isolation, and decay.

The year is 1999 and the setting is a disused sheep farm in rural NSW. The farm is dilapidated, the homestead, once magnificent, is now dark and squalid. It sits by the river and now the river is rising. As the sun sets, the floodwaters trap three women; a mother and her two daughters, one who takes care of her, one who has been away for 20 years. The screen door bangs open; Catherine has returned home from London, and amidst the claustrophobia, driving rain and decay, the truth about their family begins to float to the surface.

 

The Flood is an Australian Gothic. The set is a vast moonlit landscape, the black shadows of eucalypt trees against a darkening sky, seen through a veil of flywire. It is surreal and only too real; domestic and epic. Inside, a life of clutter, of memories pasted over, of claustrophobic chaos threatens to drown us. The gothic is often seen as a particularly European quality, but its hallmarks – the romantic, the uncanny, and the sense of looming threat – are threaded through many tales, both contemporary and historic written about the Australian bush. When the river rises we spend the night with these three women and see the interface between the monstrous and the mundane.

 

Bristling with bone-dry dark humor and edge-of-the-seat performances, The Flood plunges audiences into the lives of characters so real you feel you know them, and then reveals their secrets in a twist, upon twist, upon twist. It’s a work where the sparks and humor of these very real and lively people draw you in, make you care, and won’t let you go.

 

From internationally acclaimed, multi award-winning creators Finucane & Smith comes the haunting and electrifying work, The Flood. Part mystery, part thriller, part whodunit, part psychological drama; The Flood has been hailed as “masterful…An Australia Gothic that defines the genre”. Premiering in 2009 at Melbourne’s iconic intimate La Mama Theatre, The Flood toured Australia in 2014 for 4 months, and in 2016/2017 will be translated and produced internationally, by some of Latin America’s most exciting contemporary theatre creators.

 

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About The Flood

 

The Flood is Patrick White Playwright Award Winner Jackie’s second full-length play. It was written over a 4 year period in between a back-to-back international touring schedule that saw Smith take her work The Glory Box to 300,000 people around the world, and create new works for major festivals, galleries, theatres, and cabarets from Sweden to Tokyo to London to Ljubljana. Written in the snow in Paris, and the heat of Hong Kong, The Flood evokes a world far away from these metropolises, a run-down property in rural NSW, battered by drought and struggle, now threatened by the hundred-year flood.

 

The Flood is a work that grows out of Jackie’s shy childhood spent in Woomera and Deniliquin, her love of listening to Australian stories and storytelling, her capacity for minute observation of humanity, and a body of writing that is so particularly Australian, whose language is often so sparse, dry, humorous and disturbing that it has turned heads from the very beginning, resulting in The Patrick White Playwright Award, shortlisted for the Griffin Award, The HQ short story award, The Kit Denton Fellowship and in 2 ABC Radio Awards. The Flood premiered in December 2009 at the renowned La Mama theatre in Melbourne to a very powerful audience reaction, to a sell-out season, to immense critical acclaim including making it to 3 of “The Best of 2009” theatre lists.