Get all the dirt on Brisbane Festival headliner Scorched Earth
After huge hit Volcano at Brisbane Festival in 2024, Irish company Attic Projects returns to Brisbane with part-crime drama, part-thriller, Scorched Earth, one of the headline acts at this year’s festival.
Luke Murphy will be digging a bit of local dirt for his upcoming Brisbane Festival appearance. I mean that literally, not figuratively.
Scorched Earth is part-crime drama, part-thriller that plumbs a dark but fundamental part of the Irish psyche. Murphy, creator of the multi-award-winning Volcano, blurs the lines of dance and theatre to ask: What right do we have to the land beneath our feet and what are we willing to do to keep it?
Inspired by John B. Keane’s seminal work, The Field, stage show Scorched Earth imagines a detective reopening a cold case, an unsolved crime 12 years after the fact – a crime that involves a dispute over land. As stories are revisited and old wounds are opened, “The Detective” and “Suspect” fall into a world of memory, fantasy, ambition and resentment.
Scorched Earth is by the team who created the multi-award-winning production Volcano, including Luke Murphy (director, choreographer and performer), Alyson Cummins (set design), Stephen Dodd (lighting) and Rob Moloney (music).
yes, there will be some dirt as it’s about the battle over a patch of Irish land
Volcano was a huge hit at Brisbane Festival in 2024 and it was quite an experience – four acts of an almost four-hour dance-theatre hybrid at Brisbane Powerhouse, where Scorched Earth will play from September 17 to 20.
You might like
This new show from Murphy’s company, Attic Projects, is shorter at just 80 minutes. It involves acting, dance, some projection and, yes, there will be some dirt as it’s about the battle over a patch of Irish land. By dirt I don’t mean salacious gossip – I mean there is some actual soil in the show but due to restrictions on the importing of such material Murphy will be sourcing his dirt locally.
Which is fair enough, too, because though he is Irish and the play is identifiably Irish, it’s also universal.
The piece is a bit of a homage to the film-noir genre
“It’s one of those situations where you are telling a local story but there are many universal themes,” says Murphy, who is in Cork about to start work for the day when we chat. “It’s a very Irish story and one everyone in Ireland recognises, but once you take it out of Ireland people can project onto it from the perspective of their own experiences.”
The piece is a bit of a homage to the film-noir genre.
Subscribe for updates
“I’m a huge fan of that genre and of Scandi-Noir,” Murphy says. “I watch a lot of films and TV in that genre.”
Volcano was a homage to sci-fi and in its way Scorched Earth is a homage to film noir, on stage.
“I was working on this show when I brought Volcano to Australia,” Murphy says. “I’m excited to be coming back. I was only there for a few weeks last time, so my impressions of the country are juvenile, but more than anything I felt a real familiarity with the history of a colonised country.
‘We use dance to understand who people really are’
“I found the self-deprecation of Australians familiar and was really interested in issues around First Nations people. When we had a Welcome to Country outside Brisbane Powerhouse and were told the history of that spot of land and the river and the passing down of that knowledge in storytelling … I found that incredible and so interesting.”
Murphy is a choreographer and performer who founded Attic Projects in 2015. He’s also the artistic director of this Ireland-based contemporary dance and performance company, which produces bold multidisciplinary works across dance, theatre, film and installation, blending physical movement with deep personal storytelling. He refers to his work as “dance theatre”.
“We use dance to understand who people really are and dance functions as a theatrical device in our work,” he says. “Our shows are scripted and very theatrical, and you learn about why someone is doing something by how they move.”
Scorched Earth draws audiences into the stark world of an interrogation room, where a detective and suspect dredge through the ghosts of an unsolved murder, long thought forgotten.
“The interrogation room is a device, an avenue to explore a character under pressure,” Murphy says. “I’m interested in taking people and putting them under that pressure and that becomes a way of proposing to an audience and asking them: How would you respond?”
Murphy is the “Suspect” in this piece, which has drawn praise from critics and promises to be one of the main attractions at this year’s Brisbane Festival.
Scorched Earth, Brisbane Powerhouse, September 17 to 20.
Want to see more stories from InDaily Qld in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily Qld as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily Qld". That's it.
Free to share
This article may be shared online or in print under a Creative Commons licence