What do you do when you find out your father tried to kill your mother?

a) Forgive him, move on and love him despite the fact?
b) Erase him completely from your memory? or
c) Employ a spirit medium and have a few words with him.

Briony chose option c) and this play is the result.

PHANTASMAGORIA explores the complex relationship between a woman and her violent father long after he has passed away. Briony unearths her father’s childhood experiences in Sri Lanka, his brutal World War 2 history in Burma, migration, alcoholism, and his family’s eventual escape from him. Using a lens of magic realism, the work plunges beneath a seemingly everyday domestic space to reveal family secrets, hauntings and complex emotional landscapes.

Travelling back and forth through time and space, PHANTASMAGORIA is a sensorial feast flavoured with grief, love, loss, absurdity, surprise and a generous dose of magic. Dynamic and sensitive performance, comedy, puppetry and evocative animated imagery give physical life to the liminal realm of ghosts and the unseen.

This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

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POST-SHOW Q&A | SATURDAY 12th MARCH 2:00PM
With Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman and Louise Simms, Executive Director of Policy, Communications and Engagement at Safe and Equal.

The Q&A will explore the themes of family violence that are present in Phantasmagoria, and how we talk about trauma in performance, through a facilitated conversation between Bernadette, the writer/creator on Phantasmagoria, who has woven autobiographical elements of her own relationship with her father into the work, and Louise, who works with Safe + Equal, Victoria's peak body for family and gender-based violence. The audience will be encouraged to ask questions to guide the conversation.