From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The House of Revisions
Not to be confused with Rose House, the installation in Newcastle.
This article concerns the stage work. For the architectural concept, see Adaptation and impossibility.
The House of Revisions collapses the distinction between narrative and venue, occupying a defunct hospital building mid-conversion into theatre. Actors rehearse, perform, and accidentally dissolve the boundary between rehearsal and reality across four acts, each cycling the same scene (Katita wheeling unconscious Leif across parallel wires) through radically different architectural contexts.
Structure and plot
The audience enters a hospital corridor. Act One: the company rehearses the wire-crossing scene in anatomically sparse hallway space—fluorescent light, linoleum. The dialogue mirrors its source exactly; the scene feels drained of weight.
Act Two: The same scene reconstructed on a school-hallway set—lockers, bulletin boards, educational posters. Dialogue remains word-for-word identical, but the space renders it unrecognizable. Katita: “The wires are the same. The hallway changed.” Leif's body looks newly vulnerable in a space designed for children.
Act Three: An office-building rendition. Glass and steel. Parallel wires become architectural feature. Actors forget their lines and improvise, then discover they're saying identical things in different words. The scene fractures internally.
Act Four: The "stage" dissolves. Actors realize the building itself has been performing the scene; they are trapped in its recurrence. The audience walks out through the same corridors they entered—but the corridors are now longer, impossible to map. Katita's unseen monologue: Katita: “We've been inside the building the whole time. It's been performing us.”
Reception and safety incidents
Audience members reported genuine disorientation during exit sequences; several groups spent 45+ minutes unable to locate the building's exit despite its being a straight corridor. [citation needed] The production was shut down after three performances due to safety liability, though the artists disputed whether disorientation was intentional or architectural. Subsequent revivals have been mounted in purpose-built labyrinths. The work is frequently cited in discussions of adaptation as architectural hauntology.